Year: 2007
Type: review
Abstract: This book is a comprehensive defence of a modified Nozickian tracking account of knowledge.The account is presented as an analysis of knowledge, rather than justification.Roush allows that a tracking analysis of justification may be possible.But she denies that justification is required for knowledge.Her view is externalist, but not reliabilist.On Nozick's tracking account, knowledge involves two conditions in addition to the traditional requirements of belief and truth.The first is the variation condition: if p were false, then a subject S would not believe that p.The second is the adherence condition: if p were true, then subject S would believe that p.This analysis employs subjunctive conditionals to express the tracking conditions, and was, for that reason, found to be objectionable by some critics.The first key modification that Roush introduces of the Nozick account is to replace subjunctive conditionals with conditional probabilities.So the tracking conditions become: P(-b(p)/-p is high, while P(b)p)/p) is high and P(b(-p)/p) is low (p.75).Roush argues in chapters two and three that the modified tracking view resolves a wide range of problems that arose for the Nozick version of the view.Nozick held that knowledge is not closed under known logical implication.Roush's second key modification of the Nozick account is to include instead the requirement that one may know implications that are known to follow from a proposition that is known.She calls this view the "recursive tracking view of knowledge" (p.47).Thus, Roush counts a subject as knowing p either if the subject tracks the truth of p, or if the subject tracks q1... qn such that q1... qn imply p and the subject knows that this is so.(This is a simplification.For the full statement of the recursion clause, see p. 47.)
Author: Howard Sankey
Language: English
Subfield: Philosophy
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3128826957