For any person, there are some things they know, and some things theydon’t. What exactly is the difference? What does it take to knowsomething? It’s not enough just to believe it—wedon’t know the things we’re wrong about. Knowledge seemsto be more like a way of getting at the truth. The analysis ofknowledge concerns the attempt to articulate in what exactly this kindof “getting at the truth” consists.

More particularly, the project of analysing knowledge is to stateconditions that are individually necessary and jointly sufficient forpropositional knowledge, thoroughly answering the question, what doesit take to know something? By “propositional knowledge”,we mean knowledge of a proposition—for example, if Susan knowsthat Alyssa is a musician, she has knowledge of the proposition thatAlyssa is a musician. Propositional knowledge should be distinguishedfrom knowledge of “acquaintance”, as obtains when Susanknows Alyssa. The relation between propositional knowledge and theknowledge at issue in other “knowledge” locutions inEnglish, such as knowledge-where (“Susan knows where sheis”) and especially knowledge-how (“Susan knows how toride a bicycle”) is subject to some debate (see Stanley 2011 andhis opponents discussed therein).

The propositional knowledge that is the analysandum of the analysis ofknowledge literature is paradigmatically expressed in English bysentences of the form “S knows thatp”,where “S” refers to the knowing subject, and“p” to the proposition that is known. A proposedanalysis consists of a statement of the following form:S knowsthatp if and only ifj, wherej indicates theanalysans: paradigmatically, a list of conditions that areindividually necessary and jointly sufficient forS to haveknowledge thatp.

It is not enough merely to pick out the actual extension of knowledge.Even if, in actual fact, all cases ofS knowing thatpare cases ofj, and all cases of the latter are cases of theformer,j might fail as an analysis of knowledge. For example,it might be that there arepossible cases of knowledgewithoutj, or vice versa. A proper analysis of knowledge shouldat least be a necessary truth. Consequently, hypothetical thoughtexperiments provide appropriate test cases for various analyses, as weshall see below.

Even a necessary biconditional linking knowledge to some statej would probably not be sufficient for an analysis ofknowledge, although just what more is required is a matter of somecontroversy. According to some theorists, to analyze knowledge isliterally to identify the components that make upknowledge—compare a chemist who analyzes a sample to learn itschemical composition. On this interpretation of the project ofanalyzing knowledge, the defender of a successful analysis ofknowledge will be committed to something like the metaphysical claimthatwhat it is forS to knowp is for somelist of conditions involvingS andp to obtain. Othertheorists think of the analysis of knowledge as distinctivelyconceptual—to analyse knowledge is to limn thestructure of theconcept of knowledge. On one version of thisapproach, the conceptknowledge is literally composed of morebasic concepts, linked together by something like Boolean operators.Consequently, an analysis is subject not only to extensional accuracy,but to facts about the cognitive representation of knowledge and otherepistemic notions. In practice, many epistemologists engaging in theproject of analyzing knowledge leave these metaphilosophicalinterpretive questions unresolved; attempted analyses, andcounterexamples thereto, are often proposed without its being madeexplicit whether the claims are intended as metaphysical or conceptualones. In many cases, this lack of specificity may be legitimate, sinceall parties tend to agree that an analysis of knowledge oughtatleast to be extensionally correct in all metaphysically possibleworlds. As we shall see, many theories have been defended and,especially, refuted, on those terms.

The attempt to analyze knowledge has received a considerable amount ofattention from epistemologists, particularly in the late20^th Century, but no analysis has been widely accepted.Some contemporary epistemologists reject the assumption that knowledgeis susceptible to analysis.

• 1. Knowledge as Justified True Belief
  • 1.1 The Truth Condition
  • 1.2 The Belief Condition
  • 1.3 The Justification Condition
• 2. Lightweight Knowledge
• 3. The Gettier Problem
• 4. No False Lemmas
• 5. Modal Conditions
  • 5.1 Sensitivity
  • 5.2 Safety
  • 5.3 Relevant Alternatives
• 6. Doing Without Justification?
  • 6.1 Reliabilist Theories of Knowledge
  • 6.2 Causal Theories of Knowledge
• 7. Is Knowledge Analyzable?
• 8. Epistemic Luck
• 9. Methodological Options
• 10. Virtue-Theoretic Approaches
  • 10.1 The “AAA” Evaluations
  • 10.2 Fake Barn Cases
• 11. Knowledge First
• 12. Pragmatic Encroachment
• 13. Contextualism
• Bibliography
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Knowledge as Justified True Belief

There are three components to the traditional(“tripartite”) analysis of knowledge. According to thisanalysis, justified, true belief is necessary and sufficient forknowledge.

The tripartite analysis of knowledge is often abbreviated as the“JTB” analysis, for “justified truebelief”.

Much of the twentieth-century literature on the analysis of knowledgetook the JTB analysis as its starting-point. It became something of aconvenient fiction to suppose that this analysis was widely acceptedthroughout much of the history of philosophy. In fact, however, theJTB analysis was first articulated in the twentieth century by its attackers.^[1] Before turning to influential twentieth-centuryarguments against the JTB theory, let us briefly consider the threetraditional components of knowledge in turn.

1.1 The Truth Condition

Most epistemologists have found it overwhelmingly plausible that whatis false cannot be known. For example, Hillary Clinton did not win the2016 US Presidential election. Consequently, nobody knows that HillaryClinton won the election. One can only know things that are true.

Sometimes when people are very confident of something that turns outto be wrong, we use the word “knows” to describe theirsituation. Many people expected Clinton to win the election. Speakingloosely, one might even say that many people “knew” thatClinton would win the election—until she lost. Hazlett (2010)argues on the basis of data like this that “knows” is nota factive verb.^[2] Hazlett’s diagnosis is deeply controversial; mostepistemologists will treat sentences like “I knew that Clintonwas going to win” as a kind of exaggeration—as notliterally true.

Something’s truth does not require that anyone can know or provethat it is true. Not all truths areestablished truths. Ifyou flip a coin and never check how it landed, it may be true that itlanded heads, even if nobody has any way to tell. Truth is ametaphysical, as opposed toepistemological, notion:truth is a matter of how thingsare, not how they can beshown to be. So when we say that only true things can beknown, we’re not (yet) saying anything about how anyone canaccess the truth. As we’ll see, the other conditionshave important roles to play here. Knowledge is a kind of relationshipwith the truth—to know something is to have a certain kind ofaccess to a fact.^[3]

1.2 The Belief Condition

The belief condition is only slightly more controversial than thetruth condition. The general idea behind the belief condition is thatyou can only know what you believe. Failing to believe somethingprecludes knowing it. “Belief” in the context of the JTBtheory meansfull belief, oroutright belief. In aweak sense, one might “believe” something by virtue ofbeing pretty confident that it’s probably true—in thisweak sense, someone who considered Clinton the favourite to win theelection, even while recognizing a nontrivial possibility of herlosing, might be said to have “believed” that Clinton would win.Outright belief is stronger (see, e.g., Fantl & McGrath 2009: 141;Nagel 2010: 413–4; Williamson 2005: 108; or Gibbons 2013: 201.).To believe outright thatp, it isn’t enough to have apretty high confidence inp; it is something closer to acommitment or a being sure.^[4]

Although initially it might seem obvious that knowing thatprequires believing thatp, a few philosophers have argued thatknowledge without belief is indeed possible. Suppose Walter comes homeafter work to find out that his house has burned down. He says:“I don’t believe it”. Critics of the beliefcondition might argue that Walter knows that his house has burned down(he sees that it has), but, as his words indicate, he does not believeit. The standard response is that Walter’s avowal of disbeliefis not literally true; what Walter wishes to convey by saying “Idon’t believe it” is not that he really does not believethat his house has burned down, but rather that he finds it hard tocome to terms with what he sees. If he genuinely didn’t believeit, some of his subsequent actions, such as phoning his insurancecompany, would be rather mysterious.

A more serious counterexample has been suggested by Colin Radford(1966). Suppose Albert is quizzed on English history. One of thequestions is: “When did Queen Elizabeth die?” Albertdoesn’t think he knows, but answers the question correctly.Moreover, he gives correct answers to many other questions to which hedidn’t think he knew the answer. Let us focus on Albert’sanswer to the question about Elizabeth:

• (E)Elizabeth died in1603.

Radford makes the following two claims about this example:

1. Albert does not believe (E).
2. Albert knows (E).

Radford’s intuitions about cases like these do not seem to beidiosyncratic; Myers-Schutz & Schwitzgebel (2013) find evidencesuggesting that many ordinary speakers tend to react in the wayRadford suggests. In support of (a), Radford emphasizes that Albertthinks he doesn’t know the answer to the question. Hedoesn’t trust his answer because he takes it to be a mere guess.In support of (b), Radford argues that Albert’s answer is not atall just a lucky guess. The fact that he answers most of the questionscorrectly indicates that he has actually learned, and never forgotten,such historical facts.

Since he takes (a) and (b) to be true, Radford holds that belief is not necessary for knowledge. But either of (a) and (b) might be resisted. One might deny (a), arguing that Albert does have atacit belief that (E), even though it’s not one that he thinks amounts to knowledge. David Rose and Jonathan Schaffer (2013) take this route. Alternatively, one might deny (b), arguing that Albert’s correct answer is not an expression of knowledge, perhaps because, given his subjective position, he does not have justification for believing (E). The justification condition is the topic of the next section.

1.3 The Justification Condition

Why is condition(iii) necessary? Why not say that knowledge is truebelief? The standard answer is that to identify knowledge with truebelief would be implausible because a belief might be true even thoughit is formed improperly. Suppose that William flips a coin, andconfidently believes—on no particular basis—that it willland tails. If by chance the coin does land tails, thenWilliam’s belief was true; but a lucky guess such as this one isno knowledge. For William to know, his belief must in some epistemicsense be proper or appropriate: it must bejustified.^[5]

Socrates articulates the need for something like a justificationcondition in Plato’sTheaetetus, when he points outthat “true opinion” is in general insufficient forknowledge. For example, if a lawyer employs sophistry to induce a juryinto a belief that happens to be true, this belief is insufficientlywell-grounded to constitute knowledge.

1.3.1 Approaches to Justification

There is considerable disagreement among epistemologists concerningwhat the relevant sort of justification here consists in.Internalists about justification think that whether a beliefis justified depends wholly on states in some senseinternalto the subject. According to one common such sense of“internal”, only those features of a subject’sexperience which are directly or introspectively available count as“internal”—call this “accessinternalism”. According to another, only intrinsic states of thesubject are “internal”—call this “stateinternalism”. See Feldman & Conee 2001for the distinction.

Conee and Feldman present an example of an internalist view. They haveit thatS’s belief thatp is justified if and onlyif believing thatp is the attitude towardsp that bestfitsS’s evidence, where the latter is understood todepend only onS’s internal mental states. Conee andFeldman call their view “evidentialism”, and characterizethis as the thesis that justification is wholly a matter of thesubject’s evidence. Given their (not unsubstantial) assumptionthat what evidence a subject has is an internal matter, evidentialismimplies internalism.^[6]Externalists about justification think that factors externalto the subject can be relevant for justification; for example, processreliabilists think that justified beliefs are those which are formedby a cognitive process which tends to produce a high proportion oftrue beliefs relative to false ones.^[7] We shall return to the question of how reliabilist approaches bear onthe analysis of knowledge in§6.1.

1.3.2 Kinds of Justification

It is worth noting that one might distinguish between two importantlydifferent notions of justification, standardly referred to as“propositional justification” and “doxasticjustification”. (Sometimes “ex ante”justification and “ex post” justification, respectively.)^[8] Unlike that between internalist and externalist approaches tojustification, the distinction between propositional and doxasticjustification does not represent a conflict to be resolved; it is adistinction between two distinct properties that are called“justification”. Propositional justification concernswhether a subject has sufficient reason to believe a given proposition;^[9] doxastic justification concerns whether a given belief is held appropriately.^[10] One common way of relating the two is to suggest that propositionaljustification is the more fundamental, and that doxastic justificationis a matter of a subject’s having a belief that is appropriatelyresponsive to or based on their propositional justification.

The precise relation between propositional and doxastic justificationis subject to controversy, but it is uncontroversial that the twonotions can come apart. Suppose that Ingrid ignores a great deal ofexcellent evidence indicating that a given neighborhood is dangerous,but superstitiously comes to believe that the neighborhood isdangerous when she sees a black cat crossing the street. Since formingbeliefs on the basis of superstition is not an epistemicallyappropriate way of forming beliefs, Ingrid’s belief is notdoxastically justified; nevertheless, shedoes have goodreason to believe as she does, so she does have propositionaljustification for the proposition that the neighborhood isdangerous.

Since knowledge is a particularly successful kind of belief, doxasticjustification is a stronger candidate for being closely related toknowledge; the JTB theory is typically thought to invoke doxasticjustification (but see Lowy 1978).

2. Lightweight Knowledge

Some epistemologists have suggested that there may be multiple sensesof the term “knowledge”, and that not all of them requireall three elements of the tripartite theory of knowledge. For example,some have argued that there is, in addition to the sense of“knowledge” gestured at above, another,weaksense of “knowledge”, that requires only true belief (seefor example Hawthorne 2002 and Goldman & Olsson 2009; the lattercontains additional relevant references). This view is sometimesmotivated by the thought that, when we consider whether someone knowsthatp, or wonder which of a group of people know thatp, often, we are not at all interested in whether the relevantsubjects have beliefs that are justified; we just want to know whetherthey have the true belief. For example, as Hawthorne (2002:253–54) points out, one might ask how many students know thatVienna is the capital of Austria; the correct answer, one might think,just is the number of students who offer “Vienna” as theanswer to the corresponding question, irrespective of whether theirbeliefs are justified. Similarly, if you are planning a surprise partyfor Eugene and ask whether he knows about it, “yes” may bean appropriate answer merely on the grounds that Eugene believes thatyou are planning a party.

One could allow that there is a lightweight sense of knowledge thatrequires only true belief; another option is to decline to accept theintuitive sentences as true at face value. A theorist might, forinstance, deny that sentences like “Eugene knows that you areplanning a party”, or “eighteen students know that Viennais the capital of Austria” are literally true in the envisagedsituations, explaining away their apparent felicity as loose talk orhyperbole.

Even among those epistemologists who think that there is a lightweightsense of “knows” that does not require justification, mosttypically admit that there is also a stronger sense which does, andthat it is this stronger state that is the main target ofepistemological theorizing about knowledge. In what follows, we willset aside the lightweight sense, if indeed there be one, and focus onthe stronger one.

3. The Gettier Problem

Few contemporary epistemologists accept the adequacy of the JTBanalysis. Although most agree that each element of the tripartitetheory isnecessary for knowledge, they do not seemcollectively to besufficient. There seem to be cases ofjustified true belief that still fall short of knowledge. Here is onekind of example:

Imagine that we are seeking water on a hot day. We suddenly see water,or so we think. In fact, we are not seeing water but a mirage, butwhen we reach the spot, we are lucky and find water right there undera rock. Can we say that we had genuine knowledge of water? The answerseems to be negative, for we were just lucky. (quoted from Dreyfus1997: 292)

This example comes from the Indian philosopher Dharmottara, c. 770 CE.The 14^th-century Italian philosopher Peter of Mantuapresented a similar case:

Let it be assumed that Plato is next to you and you know him to berunning, but you mistakenly believe that he is Socrates, so that youfirmly believe that Socrates is running. However, let it be so thatSocrates is in fact running in Rome; however, you do not know this.(from Peter of Mantua’sDe scire et dubitare, given inBoh 1985: 95)

Cases like these, in which justified true belief seems in someimportant sense disconnected from the fact, were made famous in EdmundGettier’s 1963 paper, “Is Justified True BeliefKnowledge?”. Gettier presented two cases in which a true beliefis inferred from a justified false belief. He observed that,intuitively, such beliefs cannot be knowledge; it is merely lucky thatthey are true.

In honour of his contribution to the literature, cases like these havecome to be known as “Gettier cases”. Since they appear torefute the JTB analysis, many epistemologists have undertaken torepair it: how must the analysis of knowledge be modified toaccommodate Gettier cases? This is what is commonly referred to as the“Gettier problem”.

Above, we noted that one role of the justification is to rule outlucky guesses as cases of knowledge. A lesson of the Gettier problemis that it appears that even true beliefs that are justified cannevertheless be epistemically lucky in a way inconsistent withknowledge.

Epistemologists who think that the JTB approach is basically on theright track must choose between two different strategies for solvingthe Gettier problem. The first is to strengthen the justificationcondition to rule out Gettier cases as cases of justified belief. Thiswas attempted by Roderick Chisholm;^[11] we will refer to this strategy again in§7 below. The other is to amend the JTB analysis with a suitable fourthcondition, a condition that succeeds in preventing justified truebelief from being “gettiered”. Thus amended, the JTBanalysis becomes a JTB+X account of knowledge, where the“X” stands for the needed fourth condition.

Let us consider an instance of this attempt to articulate a“degettiering” condition.

4. No False Lemmas

According to one suggestion, the following fourth condition would dothe trick:

4. S’s belief thatp is not inferred from any falsehood.^[12]

In Gettier’s cases, the justified true belief is inferred from ajustified false belief. So condition(iv) explains why it isn’tknowledge. However, this “no false lemmas” proposal is notsuccessful in general. There are examples of Gettier cases that needinvolve no inference; therefore, there are possible cases of justifiedtrue belief without knowledge, even though condition(iv) is met.Suppose, for example, that James, who is relaxing on a bench in apark, observes an apparent dog in a nearby field. So he believes

4. There is a dog in the field.

Suppose further that the putative dog is actually a robot dog soperfect that it could not be distinguished from an actual dog byvision alone. James does not know that such robot dogs exist; aJapanese toy manufacturer has only recently developed them, and whatJames sees is a prototype that is used for testing the public’sresponse. Given these assumptions, (d) is of course false. But supposefurther that just a few feet away from the robot dog, there is a realdog, concealed from James’s view. Given this further assumption,James’s belief in (d) is true. And since this belief is based onordinary perceptual processes, most epistemologists will agree that itis justified. But as in Gettier’s cases, James’sbelief appears to be true only as a matter of luck, in a wayinconsistent with knowledge. So once again, what we have before us isa justified true belief that isn’t knowledge.^[13] Arguably, this belief is directly justified by a visual experience;it is not inferred from any falsehood. If so, then the JTB account,even if supplemented with(iv), gives us the wrong result that Jamesknows (d).

Another case illustrating that clause(iv) won’t do the job isthe well-known Barn County case (Goldman 1976). Suppose there is acounty in the Midwest with the following peculiar feature. Thelandscape next to the road leading through that county is pepperedwith barn-facades: structures that from the road look exactly likebarns. Observation from any other viewpoint would immediately revealthese structures to be fakes: devices erected for the purpose offooling unsuspecting motorists into believing in the presence ofbarns. Suppose Henry is driving along the road that leads through BarnCounty. Naturally, he will on numerous occasions form false beliefs inthe presence of barns. Since Henry has no reason to suspect that he isthe victim of organized deception, these beliefs are justified. Nowsuppose further that, on one of those occasions when he believes thereis a barn over there, he happens to be looking at the one and onlyreal barn in the county. This time, his belief is justified and true.But since its truth is the result of luck, it is exceedingly plausibleto judge that Henry’s belief is not an instance of knowledge.Yet condition(iv) is met in this case. His belief is not the resultof any inference from a falsehood. Once again, we see that(iv) doesnot succeed as a general solution to the Gettier problem.

5. Modal Conditions

5.1 Sensitivity

Another candidate fourth condition on knowledge issensitivity. Sensitivity, to a first approximation, is thiscounterfactual relation:

S’s belief thatp is sensitive if and only if, ifp were false,S would not believe thatp.^[14]

A sensitivity condition on knowledge was defended by Robert Nozick(1981). Given a Lewisian (Lewis 1973) semantics for counterfactualconditionals, the sensitivity condition is equivalent to therequirement that, in the nearest possible worlds in whichnot-p, the subject does not believe thatp.

One motivation for including a sensitivity condition in an analysis ofknowledge is that there seems to be an intuitive sense in whichknowledge requires not merely being correct, buttracking thetruth in other possible circumstances. This approach seems to be aplausible diagnosis of what goes wrong in at least some Gettier cases.For example, in Dharmottara’s desert water case, your beliefthat there is water in a certain location appears to be insensitive tothe fact of the water. For if there were no water there, you wouldhave held the same belief on the same grounds—viz., themirage.

However, it is doubtful that a sensitivity condition can account forthe phenomenon of Gettier cases in general. It does so only in casesin which, had the proposition in question been false, it would havebeen believed anyway. But, as Saul Kripke (2011: 167–68) haspointed out, not all Gettier cases are like this. Consider forinstance the Barn County case mentioned above. Henry looks at aparticular location where there happens to be a barn and believesthere to be a barn there. The sensitivity condition rules out thisbelief as knowledge only if, were there no barn there, Henry wouldstill have believed there was. But this counterfactual may be false,depending on how the Barn County case is set up. For instance, it isfalse if the particular location Henry is examining is not one thatwould have been suitable for the erecting of a barn façade.Relatedly, as Kripke has also indicated (2011: 186), if we supposethat barn facades are always green, but genuine barns are always red,Henry’s belief that he sees ared barn will besensitive, even though his belief that he sees abarn willnot. (We assume Henry is unaware that colour signifies anythingrelevant.) Since intuitively, the former belief looks to fall short ofknowledge in just the same way as the latter, a sensitivity conditionwill only handle some of the intuitive problems deriving from Gettiercases.

Most epistemologists today reject sensitivity requirements onknowledge. The chief motivation against a sensitivity condition isthat, given plausible assumptions, it leads to unacceptableimplications called “abominable conjunctions”.^[15] To see this, suppose first thatskepticism about ordinary knowledge is false—ordinary subjectsknow at least many of the things we ordinarily take them to know. Forexample, George, who can see and use his hands perfectly well, knowsthat he has hands. This is of course perfectly consistent with asensitivity condition on knowledge, since if George didnothave hands—if they’d been recently chopped off, forinstance—he would not believe that he had hands.

Now imagine a skeptical scenario in which George does not have hands.Suppose that George is the victim of a Cartesian demon, deceiving himinto believing that he has hands. If George were in such a scenario,of course, he would falsely believe himself not to be in such ascenario. So given the sensitivity condition, George cannot know thathe is not in such a scenario.

Although these two verdicts—the knowledge-attributing one aboutordinary knowledge, and the knowledge-denying one about the skepticalscenario—are arguably each intuitive, it is intuitivelyproblematic to hold them together. Their conjunction is, inDeRose’s term, abominable: “George knows that he hashands, but he doesn’t know that he’s not the handlessvictim of a Cartesian demon”. A sensitivity condition onknowledge, combined with the nonskeptical claim that there is ordinaryknowledge, seems to imply such abominable conjunctions.^[16]

Most contemporary epistemologists have taken considerations like theseto be sufficient reason to reject sensitivity conditions.^[17] However, seeIchikawa (2011a) for an interpretation and endorsement of thesensitivity condition according to which it may avoid commitment toabominable conjunctions.

5.2 Safety

Although few epistemologists today endorse a sensitivity condition onknowledge, the idea that knowledge requires a subject to stand in aparticular modal relation to the proposition known remains a popularone. In his 1999 paper, “How to Defeat Opposition toMoore”, Ernest Sosa proposed that asafety conditionought to take the role that sensitivity was intended to play. Sosacharacterized safety as the counterfactual contrapositive ofsensitivity.

Sensitivity:
Ifp were false,S would not believe thatp.

Safety:
IfS were to believe thatp,p would not be false.^[18]

Although contraposition is valid for the material conditional \((A\supset B\) iff \(\mathord{\sim} B \supset \mathord{\sim}A)\),Sosa suggests that it is invalid for counterfactuals, which is whysensitivity and safety are not equivalent. An example of a safe beliefthat is not sensitive, according to Sosa, is the belief that a distantskeptical scenario does not obtain. If we stipulate that George,discussed above, has never been at risk of being the victim of aCartesian demon—because, say, Cartesian demons do not exist inGeorge’s world—then George’s belief that he is notsuch a victim is a safe one, even though we saw in the previoussection that it could not be sensitive. Notice that although westipulated that George is not at risk of deceit by Cartesian demons,we didnot stipulate that George himself had any particularaccess to this fact. Unless he does, safety, like sensitivity, will beanexternalist condition on knowledge in the“access” sense. It is also externalist in the“state” sense, since the truth of the relevantcounterfactuals will depend on features outside the subject.

Characterizing safety in these counterfactual terms depends onsubstantive assumptions about the semantics of counterfactual conditionals.^[19] If we were to accept, for instance, David Lewis’s or RobertStalnaker’s treatment of counterfactuals, including a strongcentering condition according to which the actual world is alwaysuniquely closest, all true beliefs would count as safe according tothe counterfactual analysis of safety.^[20] Sosa intends the relevant counterfactuals to be making a strongerclaim, requiring roughly that inall nearby worlds in whichS believes thatp,p is not false.

Rather than resting on a contentious treatment of counterfactuals,then, it may be most perspicuous to understand the safety conditionmore directly in these modal terms, as Sosa himself often does:

Whether a JTB+safety analysis of knowledge could be successful issomewhat difficult to evaluate, given the vagueness of the stated“nearby” condition. The status of potentialcounterexamples will not always be straightforward to apply. Forexample, Juan Comesaña (2005) presents a case he takes torefute the requirement that knowledge be safe. InComesaña’s example, the host of a Halloween party enlistsJudy to direct guests to the party. Judy’s instructions are togive everyone the same directions, which are in fact accurate, butthat if she sees Michael, the party will be moved to another location.(The host does not want Michael to find the party.) Suppose Michaelnever shows up. If a given guest does not, but very nearly does,decide to wear a very realistic Michael costume to the party, then hisbelief, based in Judy’s testimony, about the whereabouts of theparty will be true, but could, Comesaña says, easily have beenfalse. (Had he merely made a slightly different choice about hiscostume, he would have been deceived.) Comesaña describes thecase as a counterexample to a safety condition on knowledge. However,it is open to a safety theorist to argue that the relevant skepticalscenario, though possible andin some sense nearby, is notnear enough in the relevant respect to falsify the safety condition.Such a theorist would, if she wanted the safety condition to deliverclear verdicts, face the task of articulating just what the relevantnotion of similarity amounts to (see also Bogardus 2014).

Not all further clarifications of a safety condition will be suitablefor the use of the latter in an analysis of knowledge. In particular,if the respect of similarity that is relevant for safety is itselfexplicated in terms of knowledge, then an analysis of knowledge whichmade reference to safety would be in this respect circular. This, forinstance, is how Timothy Williamson characterizes safety. He writes,in response to a challenge by Alvin Goldman:

In many cases, someone with no idea of what knowledge is would beunable to determine whether safety obtained. Although they could usethe principle that safety entails truth to exclude some cases, thoseare not the interesting ones. Thus Goldman will be disappointed whenhe asks what the safety account predicts about various examples inwhich conflicting considerations pull in different directions. One mayhave to decide whether safety obtains by first deciding whetherknowledge obtains, rather than vice versa. (Williamson 2009: 305)

Because safety is understood only in terms of knowledge, safety sounderstood cannot serve in an analysis of knowledge. Nor is itWilliamson’s intent that it should do so; as we will see below,Williamson rejects the project of analyzing knowledge. This is ofcourse consistent with claiming that safety is a necessary conditionon knowledge in the straightforward sense that the latter entails theformer.

5.3 Relevant Alternatives

A third approach to modal conditions on knowledge worthy of mention isthe requirement that for a subject to know thatp, she mustrule out all “relevant alternatives” top.Significant early proponents of this view include Stine 1976, Goldman1976, and Dretske 1981. The idea behind this approach to knowledge isthat for a subject to know thatp, she must be able to“rule out” competing hypotheses top—but that onlysome subset of all not-p possibilities are “relevant” forknowledge attributions. Consider for example, the differences betweenthe several models that have been produced of Apple’s iPhone. Tobe able to know by sight that a particular phone is the 6S model, itis natural to suppose that one must be able to tell the differencebetween the iPhone 6S and the iPhone 7; the possibility that the phonein question is a newer model is a relevant alternative. But perhapsthere are other possibilities in which the belief that there is aniPhone 6S is false that do not need to be ruled out—perhaps, forinstance, the possibility that the phone is not an iPhone, but aknock-off, needn’t be considered. Likewise for thepossibility that there is no phone at all, the phone-like appearancesbeing the product of a Cartesian demon’s machinations. Noticethat in these cases and many of the others that motivate therelevant-alternatives approach to knowledge, there is an intuitivesense in which the relevant alternatives tend to be moresimilar to actuality than irrelevant ones. As such, therelevant alternatives theory and safety-theoretic approaches are verysimilar, both in verdict and in spirit. As in the case of a safetytheorist, the relevant alternatives theorist faces a challenge inattempting to articulate what determines which possibilities arerelevant in a given situation.^[21]

6. Doing Without Justification?

As we have seen, one motivation for including a justificationcondition in an analysis of knowledge was to prevent lucky guessesfrom counting as knowledge. However, the Gettier problem shows thatincluding a justification condition does not rule out allepistemically problematic instances of luck. Consequently, someepistemologists have suggested that positing a justification conditionon knowledge was a false move; perhaps it is some other condition thatought to be included along with truth and belief as components ofknowledge. This kind of strategy was advanced by a number of authorsfrom the late 1960s to the early 1980s, although there has beenrelatively little discussion of it since.^[22] Kornblith 2008 provides a notable exception.

6.1 Reliabilist Theories of Knowledge

One candidate property for such a state isreliability. Partof what is problematic about lucky guesses is precisely that they areso lucky: such guesses are formed in a way such that it is unlikelythat they should turn out true. According to a certain form ofknowledge reliabilism, it is unreliability, not lack of justification,which prevents such beliefs from amounting to knowledge. Reliabilisttheories of knowledge incorporate this idea into a reliabilitycondition on knowledge.^[23] Here is an example of such a view:

Simple K-Reliabilism replaces the justification clause in thetraditional tripartite theory with a reliability clause. As we haveseen, reliabilists about justification think that justification for abelief consists in a genesis in a reliable cognitive process. Giventhis view, Simple K-Reliabilism and the JTB theory are equivalent.However, the present proposal is silent on justification. Goldman 1979is the seminal defense of reliabilism about justification; reliabilismis extended to knowledge in Goldman 1986. See Goldman 2011 for asurvey of reliabilism in general.

In the following passage, Fred Dretske articulates how an approachlike K-reliabilism might be motivated:

Those who think knowledge requires somethingother than, orat leastmore than, reliably produced true belief, something(usually) in the way of justification for the belief that one’sreliably produced beliefsare being reliably produced, have,it seems to me, an obligation to say what benefits this justificationis supposed to confer…. Who needs it, and why? If an animalinherits a perfectly reliable belief-generating mechanism, and it alsoinherits a disposition, everything being equal, toact on thebasis of the beliefs so generated, what additional benefits areconferred by a justification that the beliefsare beingproduced in some reliable way? If there are no additional benefits,what good is this justification? Why should we insist that no one canhave knowledge without it? (Dretske 1989: 95)

According to Dretske, reliable cognitive processes convey information,and thus endow not only humans, but (nonhuman) animals as well, withknowledge. He writes:

I wanted a characterization that would at least allow for thepossibility that animals (a frog, rat, ape, or my dog) could knowthings without my having to suppose them capable of the moresophisticated intellectual operations involved in traditional analysesof knowledge. (Dretske 1985: 177)

It does seem odd to think of frogs, rats, or dogs as having justifiedor unjustified beliefs. Yet attributing knowledge to animals iscertainly in accord with our ordinary practice of using the word“knowledge”. So if, with Dretske, we want an account ofknowledge that includes animals among the knowing subjects, we mightwant to abandon the traditional JTB account in favor of something likeK-reliabilism.

6.2 Causal Theories of Knowledge

Another move in a similar spirit to K-Reliabilism replaces thejustification clause in the JTB theory with a condition requiring acausal connection between the belief and the fact believed;^[24] this is the approach of Goldman (1967, 1976).^[25] Goldman’s own causal theory is a sophisticated one; we will notengage with its details here. See Goldman’s papers. Instead,consider a simplified causal theory of knowledge, which illustratesthe main motivation behind causal theories.

Do approaches like Simple K-Reliabilism or the Simple Causal Theoryfare any better than the JTB theory with respect to Gettier cases?Although some proponents have suggested they do—see e.g.,Dretske 1985: 179; Plantinga 1993: 48—many of the standardcounterexamples to the JTB theory appear to refute these views aswell. Consider again the case of the barn facades. Henry sees a realbarn, and that’s why he believes there is a barn nearby. Thisbelief is formed by perceptual processes, which are by-and-largereliable: only rarely do they lead him into false beliefs. So it lookslike the case meets the conditions of Simple K-Reliabilism just asmuch as it does those of the JTB theory. It is also a counterexampleto the causal theory, since the real barn Henry perceives is causallyresponsible for his belief. There is reason to doubt, therefore, thatshifting from justification to a condition like reliability willescape the Gettier problem.^[26] Gettier cases seem to pose as much of a problem for K-reliabilism andcausal theories as for the JTB account. Neither theory, unless amendedwith a clever “degettiering” clause, succeeds in statingsufficient conditions for knowledge.^[27]

7. Is Knowledge Analyzable?

Gettier’s paper launched a flurry of philosophical activity byepistemologists attempting to revise the JTB theory, usually by addingone or more conditions, to close the gap between knowledge andjustified true belief. We have seen already how several of theseattempts failed. When intuitive counterexamples were proposed to eachtheory, epistemologists often responded by amending their theories,complicating the existing conditions or adding new ones. Much of thisdialectic is chronicled thoroughly by Shope 1983, to which theinterested reader is directed.

After some decades of such iterations, some epistemologists began todoubt that progress was being made. In her 1994 paper, “TheInescapability of Gettier Problems”, Linda Zagzebski suggestedthat no analysis sufficiently similar to the JTB analysis could everavoid the problems highlighted by Gettier’s cases. Moreprecisely, Zagzebski argued, any analysans of the form JTB+X,whereX is a condition or list of conditions logicallyindependent from justification, truth, and belief, would besusceptible to Gettier-style counterexamples. She offered what was ineffect a recipe for constructing Gettier cases:

• (1)Start with anexample of a case where a subject has a justified false belief thatalso meets conditionX.
• (2)Modify the case sothat the belief is true merely by luck.

Zagzebski suggests that the resultant case will always represent anintuitive lack of knowledge. So any non-redundant addition to the JTBtheory will leave the Gettier problem unsolved.^[28] We may illustrate the application of the recipe using one ofZagzebski’s own examples, refuting Alvin Plantinga’s(1996) attempt to solve the Gettier problem by appending to the JTBanalysis a condition requiring that the subject’s faculties beworking properly in an appropriate environment.

In step one of Zagzebski’s procedure, we imagine a case in whicha subject’s faculties are working properly in an appropriateenvironment, but the ensuing belief, though justified, is false.Zagzebski invites us to imagine that Mary has very goodeyesight—good enough for her cognitive faculties typically toyield knowledge that her husband is sitting in the living room. Suchfaculties, even when working properly in suitable environments,however, are not infallible—if they were, the condition wouldnot be independent from truth—so we can imagine a case in whichthey go wrong. Perhaps this is an unusual instance in whichMary’s husband’s brother, who looks a lot like thehusband, is in the living room, and Mary concludes, on the basis ofthe proper function of her visual capacity, that her husband is in theliving room. This belief, since false, is certainly not knowledge.

In step two, we imagine Mary’s misidentification of the occupantof the living room as before, but add to the case that the husband is,by luck, also in the living room. Now Mary’s belief is true, butintuitively, it is no more an instance of knowledge than the falsebelief in the first step was.

Since the recipe is a general one, it appears to be applicable to anycondition one might add to the JTB theory, so long as it does notitself entail truth. The argument generalizes against all“non-redundant” JTB+X analyses.

One potential response to Zagzebski’s argument, and the failureof the Gettier project more generally, would be to conclude thatknowledge is unanalyzable. Although it would represent a significantdeparture from much analytic epistemology of the late twentiethcentury, it is not clear that this is ultimately a particularlyradical suggestion. Few concepts of interest have proved susceptibleto traditional analysis (Fodor 1998). One prominent approach toknowledge in this vein is discussed in§11 below.

Another possible line is the one mentioned in§2—to strengthen the justification condition to rule out Gettier cases asjustified. In order for this strategy to prevent Zagzebski’srecipe from working, one would need to posit a justification conditionthat precludes the possibility of step one above—the onlyobvious way to do this is for justification to entail truth. If itdoes, then it will of course be impossible to start with a case thathas justified false belief. This kind of approach is not at all mainstream, but it doeshave its defenders—see e.g., Sturgeon1993 and Merricks1995. Sutton 2007 and Littlejohn 2012 defend factive approaches tojustification on other grounds.

A third avenue of response would be to consider potential analyses ofknowledge that are not of the nonredundant form JTB+X. Indeed,we have already seen some such attempts, albeit unsuccessful ones. Forinstance, the causal theory of knowledge includes a clause requiringthat the belief thatp be caused by the fact thatp.This condition entails both belief and truth, and so is notsusceptible to Zagzebski’s recipe. (As we’ve seen, itfalls to Gettier-style cases on other grounds.) One family ofstrategies along these lines would build into an analysis of knowledgea prohibition on epistemic luck directly; let us consider this sort ofmove in more detail.

8. Epistemic Luck

If the problem illustrated by Gettier cases is that JTB and JTB+analyses are compatible with a degree of epistemic luck that isinconsistent with knowledge, a natural idea is to amend one’sanalysis of knowledge by including an explicit “anti-luck”condition. Zagzebski herself outlines this option in her 1994 (p. 72).Unger 1968 gives an early analysis of this kind. For example:

The first thing to note about this analysis is that it is“redundant” in the sense described in the previoussection; the fourth condition entails the first two.^[29] So its surface form notwithstanding, it actually represents asignificant departure from the JTB+ analyses. Rather than composingknowledge from various independent components, this analysis demandsinstead that the epistemic states are related to one another insubstantive ways.

The anti-luck condition, like the safety condition of the previoussection, is vague as stated. For one thing, whether a belief is trueby luck comes in degrees—just how much luck does it take to beinconsistent with knowledge? Furthermore, it seems, independently ofquestions about degrees of luck, we must distinguish between differentkinds of luck. Not all epistemic luck is incompatible withhaving knowledge. Suppose someone enters a raffle and wins anencyclopedia, then reads various of its entries, correcting many oftheir previous misapprehensions. There is a straightforward sense inwhich the resultant beliefs are true only by luck—for oursubject was very lucky to have won that raffle—but this is notthe sort of luck, intuitively, that interferes with the possession of knowledge.^[30] Furthermore, there is a sense in which our ordinary perceptual beliefsare true by luck, since it is possible for us to have been the victim of aCartesian demon and so we are, in some sense, lucky not to be. Butunless we are to capitulate to radical skepticism, it seems that thissort of luck, too, ought to be considered compatible with knowledge.^[31]

Like the safety condition, then, a luck condition ends up beingdifficult to apply in some cases. We might try to clarify the luckcondition as involving a distinctive notion of epistemicluck—but unless we were able to explicate that notion—ineffect, to distinguish between the two kinds of luck mentionedabove—without recourse to knowledge, it is not clear that theensuing analysis of knowledge could be both informative andnoncircular.

9. Methodological Options

As our discussion so far makes clear, one standard way of evaluatingattempted analyses of knowledge has given a central role to testing itagainst intuitions against cases. In the late twentieth century, theperceived lack of progress towards an acceptableanalysis—including the considerations attributed to Zagzebski in§7 above—led some epistemologists to pursue othermethodological strategies. (No doubt, a wider philosophical trend awayfrom “conceptual analysis” more broadly also contributedto this change.) Some of the more recent attempts to analyse knowledgehave been motivated in part by broader considerations about the roleof knowledge, or of discourse about knowledge.

One important view of this sort is that defended by Edward Craig(1990). Craig’s entry-point into the analysis of knowledge wasnot intuitions about cases, but rather a focus on the role that theconcept of knowledge plays for humans. In particular, Craig suggestedthat the point of using the category of knowledge was for people toflag reliable informants—to help people know whom to trust inmatters epistemic. Craig defends an account of knowledge that isdesigned to fill this role, even though it is susceptible to intuitivecounterexamples. The plausibility of such accounts, with a lessintuitive extension but with a different kind of theoreticaljustification, is a matter of controversy.

Another view worth mentioning in this context is that of HilaryKornblith (2002), which has it that knowledge is a natural kind, to beanalysed the same way other scientific kinds are. Intuition has a roleto play in identifying paradigms, but generalizing from there is anempirical, scientific matter, and intuitive counterexamples are to beexpected.

The “knowledge first” stance is also connected to thesemethodological issues. See§11 below.

10. Virtue-Theoretic Approaches

The virtue-theoretic approach to knowledge is in some respects similarto the safety and anti-luck approaches. Indeed, Ernest Sosa, one ofthe most prominent authors of the virtue-theoretic approach, developedit from his previous work on safety. The virtue approach treatsknowledge as a particularly successful or valuable form of belief, andexplicates what it is to be knowledge in such terms. Like theanti-luck theory, a virtue-theoretic theory leaves behind the JTB+project of identifying knowledge with a truth-functional combinationof independent epistemic properties; knowledge, according to thisapproach, requires a certain non-logical relationship between beliefand truth.

10.1 The “AAA” Evaluations

Sosa has often (e.g., Sosa 2007: ch. 2) made use of an analogy of askilled archer shooting at a target; we may find it instructive aswell. Here are two ways in which an archer’s shot might beevaluated:

1. Was the shot successful? Did it hit its target?
2. Did the shot’s executionmanifest thearcher’s skill? Was it produced in a way that makes it likely tosucceed?

The kind of success at issue in (1), Sosa callsaccuracy. Thekind of skill discussed in (2), Sosa callsadroitness. A shotis adroit if it is produced skillfully. Adroit shots needn’t beaccurate, as not all skilled shots succeed. And accurate shotsneedn’t be adroit, as some unskilled shots are lucky.

In addition to accuracy and adroitness, Sosa suggests that there isanother respect in which a shot may be evaluated, relating the two.This, Sosa callsaptness.

3. Did the shot’ssuccess manifest the archer’sskill?

A shot is apt if it is accuratebecause adroit. Aptnessentails, but requires more than, the conjunction of accuracy andadroitness, for a shot might be both successful and skillful withoutbeing apt. For example, if a skillful shot is diverted by anunexpected gust of wind, then redirected towards the target by asecond lucky gust, its ultimate accuracy does not manifest the skill,but rather reflects the lucky coincidence of the wind.

Sosa suggests that this “AAA” model of evaluation isapplicable quite generally for the evaluation of any action or objectwith a characteristic aim. In particular, it is applicable to beliefwith respect to its aim at truth:

1. A belief isaccurate if and only if it is true.
2. A belief isadroit if and only if it is produced skillfully.^[32]
3. A belief isapt if and only if it is true in a waymanifesting, or attributable to, the believer’s skill.

Sosa identifies knowledge with apt belief, so understood.^[33] Knowledge entails both truth (accuracy) and justification(adroitness), on this view, but they are not merely independentcomponents out of which knowledge is truth-functionally composed. Itrequires that the skill explain the success. This is in some respectssimilar to the anti-luck condition we have examined above, in that itlegislates that the relation between justification and truth be nomere coincidence. However, insofar as Sosa’s “AAA”model is generally applicable in a way going beyond epistemology,there are perhaps better prospects for understanding the relevantnotion of aptness in a way independent of understanding knowledgeitself than we found for the notion of epistemic luck.

10.2 Fake Barn Cases

Understanding knowledge as apt belief accommodates Gettier’straditional counterexamples to the JTB theory ratherstraightforwardly. When Smith believes that either Jones owns a Fordor Brown is in Barcelona, the accuracy of his belief is notattributable to his inferential skills (which the case does not callinto question). Rather, unlucky circumstances (the misleading evidenceabout Jones’s car) have interfered with his skillful cognitiveperformance, just as the first diverting gust of wind interfered withthe archer’s shot. Compensating for the unlucky interference, alucky circumstance (Brown’s coincidental presence in Barcelona)renders the belief true after all, similar to the way in which thesecond gust of wind returns the archer’s arrow back onto theproper path towards the target.

Fake barn cases, by contrast, may be less easily accommodated bySosa’s AAA approach. When Henry looks at the only real barn in acountryside full of barn facades, he uses a generally reliableperceptual faculty for recognizing barns, and he goes right in thisinstance. Suppose we say the accuracy of Henry’s beliefmanifests his competence as a perceiver. If so, we would have to judgethat his belief is apt and therefore qualifies as an instance ofknowledge. That would be a problematic outcome because the intuitionthe case is meant to elicit is that Henry doesnot haveknowledge. There are three ways in which an advocate of the AAAapproach might respond to this difficulty.

First, AAA advocates might argue that, although Henry has a generalcompetence to recognize barns, he is deprived of this ability in hiscurrent environment, precisely because he is in fake barn county.According to a second, subtly different strategy, Henry retainsbarn-recognition competence, his current location notwithstanding,but, due to the ubiquity of fake barns, his competence does notmanifest itself in his belief, since its truth is attributable more toluck than to his skill in recognizing barns.^[34] Third, Sosa’s own response to the problem is to bite thebullet. Judging Henry’s belief to be apt, Sosa accepts theoutcome that Henry knows there is a barn before him. He attempts toexplain away the counterintuitiveness of this result by emphasizingthe lack of a further epistemically valuable state, which he calls“reflective knowledge” (see Sosa 2007: 31–32).

11. Knowledge First

Not every concept is analyzable into more fundamental terms. This isclear both upon reflection on examples—what analysis could beoffered ofhydrogen,animal, orJohn F.Kennedy?—and on grounds of infinite regress. Why should wethink thatknowledge has an analysis? In recent work,especially his 2000 bookKnowledge and Its Limits, TimothyWilliamson has argued that the project of analyzing knowledge was amistake. His reason is not that he thinks that knowledge is anuninteresting state, or that the notion of knowledge is somehowfundamentally confused. On the contrary, Williamson thinks thatknowledge is among the most fundamental psychological andepistemological states there are. As such, it is a mistake to analyzeknowledge in terms of other, more fundamental epistemic notions,because knowledge itself is, in at least many cases, more fundamental.As Williamson puts it, we should put “knowledge first”.Knowledge might figure into some analyses, but it will do so in theanalysans, not in the analysandum.^[35]

There is no very straightforward argument for this conclusion; itscase consists largely in the attempted demonstration of thetheoretical success of the knowledge first stance. Weighing thesebenefits against those of more traditional approaches to knowledge isbeyond the scope of this article.^[36]

Although Williamson denies that knowledge is susceptible to analysisin the sense at issue in this article, he does think that there areinteresting and informative ways to characterize knowledge. Forexample, Williamson accepts these claims:

• Knowledge is the most general factive mental state.
• S knows thatp if and only ifS’s totalevidence includes the proposition thatp.

Williamson is also careful to emphasize that the rejection of theproject of analyzing knowledge in no way suggests that there are notinteresting and informative necessary or sufficient conditions onknowledge. The traditional ideas that knowledge entails truth, belief,and justification are all consistent with the knowledge first project.And Williamson (2000: 126) is explicit in endorsement of a safetyrequirement on knowledge—just not one that serves as part of ananalysis.

One point worth recognizing, then, is that one need not engage in theambitious project of attempting to analyze knowledge in order to havecontact with a number of interesting questions about which factors areand are not relevant for whether a subject has knowledge. In the nextsection, we consider an important contemporary debate about whetherpragmatic factors are relevant for knowledge.

12. Pragmatic Encroachment

Traditional approaches to knowledge have it that knowledge has to dowith factors like truth and justification. Whether knowledge requiressafety, sensitivity, reliability, or independence from certain kindsof luck has proven controversial. But something that all of thesepotential conditions on knowledge seem to have in common is that theyhave some sort of intimate connection with the truth of the relevantbelief. Although it is admittedly difficult to make the relevantconnection precise, there is an intuitive sense in which every factorwe’ve examined as a candidate for being relevant to knowledgehas something to do with truth of the would-be knowledgeablebeliefs.

In recent years, some epistemologists have argued that focus on suchtruth-relevant factors leaves something important out of our pictureof knowledge. In particular, they have argued that distinctivelypragmatic factors are relevant to whether a subject hasknowledge. Call this thesis “pragmatic encroachment”:^[37]

The constitution claim here is important; it is trivial thatdifferences in pragmatic circumstances cancause differencesin knowledge. For example, if the question of whether marijuana use islegal in Connecticut is more important to Sandra than it is to Daniel,Sandra is more likely to seek out evidence, and come to knowledge,than Daniel is. This uninteresting claim is not what is at issue.Pragmatic encroachment theorists think that the practical importanceitself can make for a change in knowledge, without reliance on suchdownstream effects as a difference in evidence-gathering activity.Sandra and Daniel might in some sense be inthe same epistemicposition, where the only difference is that the question is moreimportant to Sandra. This difference, according to pragmaticencroachment, might make it the case that Daniel knows, but Sandradoes not.^[38]

Pragmatic encroachment can be motivated by intuitions about cases.Jason Stanley’s 2005 bookKnowledge and PracticalInterests argues that it is the best explanation for pairs ofcases like the following, where the contrasted cases are evidentiallyalike, but differ pragmatically:

Stanley argues that the moral of cases like these is that in general,the more important the question of whetherp, the harder it isto know thatp. Other, more broadly theoretical, arguments forpragmatic encroachment have been offered as well. Fantl & McGrath(2009) argue that encroachment follows from fallibilism and plausibleprinciples linking knowledge and action, while Weatherson 2012 arguesthat the best interpretation of decision theory requiresencroachment.

Pragmatic encroachment is not an analysis of knowledge; it is merelythe claim that pragmatic factors are relevant for determining whethera subject’s belief constitutes knowledge. Some, but not all,pragmatic encroachment theorists will endorse a necessarybiconditional that might be interpreted as an analysis of knowledge.For example, a pragmatic encroachment theorist might claim that:

S knows thatp if and only if no epistemic weaknessvis-á-visp preventsS from properly usingp as a reason for action.

This connection between knowledge and action is similar to onesendorsed by Fantl & McGrath (2009), but it is stronger thananything they argue for.

Pragmatic encroachment on knowledge is deeply controversial. PatrickRysiew (2001), Jessica Brown (2006), and Mikkel Gerken (forthcoming) haveargued that traditional views about the nature of knowledge aresufficient to account for the data mentioned above. MichaelBlome-Tillmann (2009a) argues that it has unacceptablycounterintuitive results, like the truth of such claims asS knows thatp, but if it were more important, shewouldn’t know, orS knew thatp until thequestion became important. Stanley (2005) offers strategies foraccepting such consequences. Other, more theoretical arguments againstencroachment have also been advanced; see for example Ichikawa,Jarvis, and Rubin (2012), who argue that pragmatic encroachment is atodds with important tenets of belief-desire psychology.

13. Contextualism

One final topic standing in need of treatment is contextualism aboutknowledge attributions, according to which the word“knows” and its cognates are context-sensitive. Therelationship between contextualism and the analysis of knowledge isnot at all straightforward. Arguably, they have different subjectmatters (the former a word, and the latter a mental state).Nevertheless, the methodology of theorizing about knowledge may behelpfully informed by semantic considerations about the language inwhich such theorizing takes place. And if contextualism is correct,then a theorist of knowledge must attend carefully to the potentialfor ambiguity.

It is uncontroversial that many English words are context-sensitive.The most obvious cases are indexicals, such as “I”,“you”, “here”, and “now” (DavidKaplan 1977 gives the standard view of indexicals).

The word “you” refers to a different person, depending onthe conversational context in which it is uttered; in particular, itdepends on the person one is addressing. Other context-sensitive termsare gradable adjectives like “tall”—how tallsomething must be to count as “tall” depends on theconversational context—and quantifiers like“everyone”—which people count as part of“everyone” depends on the conversational context.Contextualists about “knows” think that this verb belongson the list of context-sensitive terms. A consequence of contextualismis that sentences containing “knows” may express distinctpropositions, depending on the conversational contexts in whichthey’re uttered. This feature allows contextualists to offer aneffective, though not uncontroversial, response to skepticism. For amore thorough overview of contextualism and its bearing on skepticism,see Rysiew 2011 or Ichikawa forthcoming-b.

Contextualists have modeled this context-sensitivity in various ways.Keith DeRose 2009 has suggested that there is a context-invariantnotion of “strength of epistemic position”, and that howstrong a position one must be in in order to satisfy“knows” varies from context to context; this is in effectto understand the semantics of knowledge attributions much as weunderstand that of gradable adjectives. (How much height one must haveto satisfy “tall” also varies from context to context.)Cohen 1988 adopts a contextualist treatment of “relevantalternatives” theory, according to which, in skeptical contexts,but not ordinary ones, skeptical possibilities are relevant. Thisaspect is retained in the view of Lewis 1996, which characterizes acontextualist approach that is more similar to quantifiers and modals.Blome-Tillmann 2009b andIchikawa forthcoming-a defend anddevelop the Lewisian view in different ways.

Contextualism and pragmatic encroachment represent differentstrategies for addressing some of the same “shifty”patterns of intuitive data. (In fact, contextualism was generallydeveloped first; pragmatic encroachment theorists were motivated inpart by the attempt to explain some of the patterns contextualistswere interested in without contextualism’s semanticcommitments.) Although this represents a sense in which they tend tobe rival approaches, contextualism and pragmatic encroachment are byno means inconsistent. One could think that “knows”requires the satisfaction of different standards in differentcontexts, andalso think that the subject’s practicalsituation is relevant for whether a given standard is satisfied.

Like pragmatic encroachment, contextualism is deeply controversial.Critics have argued that it posits an implausible kind of semanticerror in ordinary speakers who do not recognize the putativecontext-sensitivity—see Schiffer 1996 and Greenough &Kindermann forthcoming—and that it is at odds with plausibletheoretical principles involving knowledge—see Hawthorne 2003,Williamson 2005, and Worsnip forthcoming. In addition, some of the argumentsthat are used to undercut the data motivating pragmatic encroachmentare also taken to undermine the case for contextualism; see againRysiew 2001 and Brown 2006.

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Acknowledgments

For the 2012 revision, we are grateful to Kurt Sylvan for extremelydetailed and constructive comments on multiple drafts of this entry.Thanks also to an anonymous referee for additional helpfulsuggestions. For the 2017 revision, thanks to Clayton Littlejohn,Jennifer Nagel, and Scott Sturgeon for helpful and constructivefeedback and suggestions. Thanks to Ben Bayer, Kenneth Ehrenberg, andMark Young for drawing our attention to errors in the previousversion.