SOC SCI H1G Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Naturalized Epistemology, Descriptive Knowledge, Foundationalism

• School: UC-Irvine
• Department: Social Science
• Course: SOC SCI H1G
• Professor: S T A N F O R D, P.B A R R E T T, J.

Document Summary

Epistemology - the study of knowledge & belief. Ancient greeks distinguish btwn knowledge & opinion. Opinion = what you believe; they vary from person to person & can change. Plato had socrates argue that knowledge was true belief w/ logos (logos. = logic, reason, explanation, rational justification, plan, etc) Explanation = descriptive, a sequence events; you can explain beliefs by explaining how you came to believe them. Justification = prescriptive, normative, what ought to have happened; stating why someone should believe something. Philosophers settled on knowledge as true justified belief - belief that happens to be true and you ought to believe it bc it has a rational justification. We know how to do a lot of things without knowing that we"re doing them. People believe a wide variety of things. Agent x knows proposition p if and only if. X has rational justification for believing p. You can"t know something without believing it.