Knowledge and Justified Belief

Catalog description

Knowledge acquisition is central to the university's mission. The sciences seek knowledge of nature. Statistics concerns methods for finding and establishing scientific knowledge. Machine learning concerns the automated generation of knowledge. Database theory concerns the maintenance of knowledge. But then what are knowledge, justified belief, truth, and evidence, and how do all of those concepts fit together? The branch of philosophy that studies those questions is called epistemology, which just means "study of knowledge". This class confronts the central epistemological questions. Topics include the analysis of knowledge and justification (what are they?), skepticism (the justifiability of beliefs that goes beyond the data available), and the relationship between knowledge and deductive logic (are the consequences of knowledge knowable?). The proposed answers involve a subtle interplay of logic, probability, causation, and counterfactual reasoning. The course is self-contained, so there are no prerequisites.