Knowledge, Safety, and Questions

Autores

  • Brian Ball Balliol College, Oxford New College of the Humanities, London

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.4013/fsu.2016.171.07

Resumo

Safety-based theories of knowledge face a difficulty surrounding necessary truths: no subject could have easily falsely believed such a proposition. Failing to predict that ill-grounded beliefs in such propositions do not constitute knowledge, standard safety theories are therefore less informative than desired. Some have suggested that the subjects at issue could easily have believed some related false proposition; but they have given no indication as to what makes a proposition related. I suggest a solution to this problem: a belief is safe iff its subject could not easily have believed a false answer to the same question.

Keywords: epistemology, knowledge, problem of necessary truths, questions, safety.

Biografia do Autor

Brian Ball, Balliol College, Oxford New College of the Humanities, London

Brian Ball studied philosophy, with a minor concentration in linguistics, at McGill University, before completing his BPhil and DPhil at the University of Oxford. He was subsequently a lecturer in philosophy at St Anne's College, and now Balliol, Oxford, and is currently a senior lecturer in philosophy at the New College of the Humanities in London. He works in epistemology, metaphysics, the philosophy of language, and the philosophy of mind, and has published in these areas in a number of top journals.

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Publicado

2016-07-02

Edição

v. 17 n. 1 (2016): Janeiro/Abril

Seção

Philosophy South

Licença

Concedo a revista Filosofia Unisinos – Unisinos Journal of Philosophy o direito de primeira publicação da versão revisada do meu artigo, licenciado sob a Licença Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 (que permite o compartilhamento do trabalho com reconhecimento da autoria e publicação inicial nesta revista).

Afirmo ainda que meu artigo não está sendo submetido a outra publicação e não foi publicado na íntegra em outro periódico e assumo total responsabilidade por sua originalidade, podendo incidir sobre mim eventuais encargos decorrentes de reivindicação, por parte de terceiros, em relação à autoria do mesmo.