Theory of Knowledge

Catalog description

How do we know what we think we know? Socrates was praised by the oracle for knowing his ignorance. When you ace a test, you conclude that you really know your stuff. But without the oracles or test scores without gods or enforcers-what have we got to go on? The aim of this course is to evaluate some important challenges to the very idea that we can know anything. We'll examine the threat to knowledge posed by relativism, consider the "standard analysis" of knowledge and the attempts to improve on it in the face of its apparent shortcomings, evaluate contrasting accounts of knowledge, weigh the perspective of skepticism and the strenths and weaknesses of attempts to refute it, and make sense of the therapeutic response to skepticism offered by Ludwig Wittgenstein and his followers.