Chapter 9 - What makes knowledge the most highly prized form of true belief?

Summary

This chapter provides grounds for thinking that it is the quality of the reasons for the propositional content of our belief-states with true propositional contents, rather than the etiology of those belief-states, that determines whether the belief-state qualifies as knowledge. Normative epistemology rather than naturalized epistemology holds the key to understanding knowledge. This chapter delineates some important features of epistemic luck. It explores the etiology view and presents reasons for concluding that it cannot adequately account for epistemic luck. The chapter then explores the reasons view and shows how it can account for some of the cases that are troublesome for the etiology view. There are many well-discussed and widely accepted counterexamples in the literature for each of the etiology views, with the exception of the virtue-views because those views are still relatively new.