PHIL 482BTheories of Knowledge

Catalog

This course introduces students to several, quite different ways of thinking about what we know and how we know it. We will first establish a grounding in classic analytic epistemology, which starts from a binary conception of belief and focuses on the difference between true belief and knowledge. We will then explore two rather different approaches to the same topic. Buddhist epistemology focuses on what characteristics of a cognitive episode make it a reliable source of practically useful guidance. Bayesian epistemology abandons the binary understanding of belief in favor of "credences," how likely you think any given claim is to be true. It then focuses on how a rational agent should update these credences in light of new evidence. Each of these approaches to knowledge has its own insights and gives rise to its own puzzles and paradoxes. This course requires a familiarity with the basics of logic; in the third unit of the class, students will use simple algebra and learn some probability theory.