Knowledge: A Very Short Introduction

Jennifer Nagel, Oxford University Press 2014

1. Introduction
2. Scepticism
3. Rationalism and empiricism
4. The analysis of knowledge
5. Internalism and externalism
6. Testimony
7. Shifting standards?
8. Knowing about knowing

Notable people: Ancient Greek philosopher Protagoras, Plato, Pyrrho of Elis, philosopher Michel de Montaigne, Rene Descartes, English philosopher G. E. Moore, Bertand Russell, Jonathan Vogel, Ruth Barccan Marcus, Saul Kripke, Hilary Putnam, philosopher David Chalmers, Oxford philosopher Timothy Williamson, renaissance thinker Paracelsus, Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo, Francesco Sizzi, Antoine Arnauld, Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia, English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, English philosopher John Locke, Edmund Gettier, Alvin Goldman, American philosopher Linda Zegzebski, Matt Weiner, Timothy Williamson, 

Terms:
Epistemology - distinguishing justified belief from opinion via method, validity, scope.
Factivity - state of being a fact.
Academic skepticism - concluded that knowledge was impossible.
Pyrrhonian skepticism - to reach no conclusions at all, suspend all judgement, keep two sides of a question in balance.
Stoic epistemology - the distinction between impression and judgement.
Semantic externalism vs internalism - words get their meaning from causal chains connecting things vs images and descriptions that individual speakers associate with words in their binds.
Rationalism - abstract concepts are the heart of knowledge pursuit, using algebra, geometry, math...
Empiricism - knowledge comes only or primarily from sensory experience.
Intuitive knowledge - immediate grasp or disagreement of an idea.
Demonstrative knowledge - sees but a part the agreement or disagreement chain of thought.
Sensitive knowledge - of things you are sensing as opposed to remembering, linking ideas to reality.
Casual theory of knowledge - experience based knowledge requires the knower to be causally connected to a fact. It doesn’t matter whether these adults remember exactly what their sources were; what matters is just that their beliefs actually have an appropriate causal chain anchoring them to the fact believed.
Reliabilism - a belief is justified based on how it is formed, ex. thermometer, laws of nature.

Briefs:
It's hard to differentiate between knowledge and opinion. Even knowledgeable people may be subject to misleading evidence.
Knowledge can be acquired, used, lost - but depends on the existence of someone who knows.
A group can know a fact because it is known to all in the group.
Groups can combine individual knowledge to form a general knowledge even though each only focus on a specific aspect of the whole.
Knowledge links a person to a fact.
Often knowledge is incorrectly determined by the status of the person, and not by the reality of the idea.
Power delivers advantages that can help a person gain knowledge, and knowledge to gain power.
Cynical Theory states "there is nothing more to knowledge than the perception of power."
It can be hard to differentiate between knowing and seeming to know.
Think is non-factive, which could or couldn't be true. Confidence matters to knowledge.
One who is confident for the wrong reasons fails to have knowledge.
Truth (Protagoras); nothing is simply true but is relative to a subject and time.
We start with impressions, and accept them or reject them, but how do we discern which to which.
Humans abuse freedom by accepting ideas that are less than clear and distinct.
Knowledge is possible when we coordinate our mental powers, subjecting our confused sensations to the discipline of our innate rationality.
Different perspectives are used to reason about knowledge, first person can ask what I know for certain, without depending on external environment, to third person, where the observation of others along yourself allow you to relate the sensory perception between a person and their environment.
Not every true belief counts as knowledge.

chapter 5 internalism and externalism