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Knowledge and Explanation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

C. S. Jenkins
C. S. Jenkins*
Affiliation:
University of St. Andrews Edgecliffe, The Scores St. Andrews, Fife Scotland KY16 9AL
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Extract

Craig (1990) casts doubt upon the project of trying to give the traditional sort of necessary and sufficient conditions for A knows that p. He interprets the inadequacy of existing analyses of knowledge as evidence that our concept of knowledge is complex and diffuse, and concludes that we should aim to understand it by thinking about the rôle the concept plays in our lives, rather than by trying to find necessary and sufficient conditions for the truth of knowledge ascriptions.

There is surely something right about Craig's view: we are unlikely to succeed in any attempt to analyse away the intricacies in our concept of knowledge. We cannot realistically hope to uncover a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for A knows that p which are in all cases either clearly satisfied or clearly not satisfied. Nor, I suspect, is it possible to offer necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge which are widely accepted as being more securely understood than knowledge itself.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , June 2006 , pp. 137 - 164
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 2006

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