This is my review of the recent reissue of Sidney Hook's The Metaphysics of Pragmatism--which arose directly from Hook's Ph.D. dissertation written at Columbia under John Dewey.

This paper assesses several prominent recent attacks on the view that epistemic justification is conceptually prior to knowledge. I argue that this view—call it the Received View (RV)—emerges from these attacks unscathed. I start with Timothy Williamson’s two strongest arguments for the claim that all evidence is knowledge (E>K), which impugns RV when combined with the claim that justification depends on evidence. One of Williamson’s arguments assumes a false epistemic closure principle; the other misses some alternative (to E>K) explanations of (...) a putative fact about the evidence a particular subject has. Next, I neutralize each of Jonathan Sutton’s three recent arguments to the conclusion that any justified belief constitutes knowledge. Finally, I consider a recent analysis of justification due to Alexander Bird, according to which justified belief is possible knowledge. I argue that Bird’s analysis delivers neither a sufficient nor (more importantly) a necessary condition for justification. [Word count: 149]. (shrink)

At least since the days of ‘ordinary language philosophy’, epistemologists (some more than others) have been interested in knowledge attributions – the meaning or meanings of ‘knows’, the use or uses of sentences of the form ‘S knows p’, and so on. And there has more recently been renewed interest in how ‘knows’ is used.1 Theorizing about knowledge on the basis of how ‘knows’ is used is, at least in principle, quite different from the epistemological tradition exemplified by the ‘post-Gettier’ (...) literature on the analysis of knowledge. In this tradition, necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge are proposed, and tested against potential counterexamples. Imaginary situations are described, and intuitions (which are presumed correct) are elicited concerning whether or not a character in the story knows a certain proposition.2 Contrast this with the linguistic method: imaginary situations are described, and intuitions (which are presumed correct) are elicited concerning whether or not a character in the story said something acceptable.3 On the basis of this, a theory of the meaning of ‘knows’ is developed. But note that the result of this linguistic method might be a conclusion of the same kind as the result of the post-Gettier method, for one theory of the meaning of a.. (shrink)