Peter Baumann and Nicholas Shackel defend me against a serious criticism by Christoph Jäger. They argue that my account of information is consistent with my denial of closure for knowledge. Information isn’t closed under known entailment either. I think that, technically speaking, they are right. But the way they are right doesn’t help me much in my effort to answer the skeptic. I describe a way in which information, like knowledge, fails to be closed in a way that makes an (...) information-based account of knowledge an effective tool in answering the skeptic. (shrink)
Externalism about knowledge commits one to a modest form of contextualism: whether one knows depends (or may depend) on circumstances (context) of which one has no knowledge. Such modest contextualism requires the rejection of the KK Principle (If S knows that P, then S knows that S knows that P) - something most people would want to reject anyway - but it does not require (though it is compatible with) a rejection of closure. Radical contextualism, on the other hand, goes (...) a step farther and relativizes knowledge not just to the circumstances of the knower, but to the circumstances of the person attributing knowledge. I reject this more radical form of contextualism and suggest that it confuses (or that it can, at least, be avoided by carefully distinguishing) the relativity in what S is said to know from the relativity in whether S knows what S is said to know. (shrink)
Causal explanations of behavior must distinguish two kinds of cause. There are (what I call) triggering causes, the events or conditions that come before the effect and are followed regularly by the effect, and (what I call) structuring causes, events that cause a triggering cause to produce its effect. Moving the mouse is the triggering cause of cursor movement; hardware and programming conditions are the structuring causes of cursor movement. I use this distinction to show how representational facts (how an (...) animal represents the world) can be structuring causes of behavior even though biological (i.e., electrical–chemical) events trigger the behavior. (shrink)
In this anthology, distinguished editors Sven Bernecker and Fred Dretske offer the most comprehensive review available of contemporary epistemology. They bring together the most important and influential writings in the field, including frequently neglected topics such as dominant responses to skepticism, introspection, memory, and testimony. Knowledge is divided into fifteen subject areas and includes forty-one readings by eminent contributors. An accessible introduction to each subject area outlines the problems discussed in the essays that follow so that students can focus on (...) analyzing them. (shrink)
This collection of essays by eminent philosopher Fred Dretske brings together work on the theory of knowledge and philosophy of mind spanning thirty years. The two areas combine to lay the groundwork for a naturalistic philosophy of mind. The fifteen essays focus on perception, knowledge, and consciousness. Together, they show the interconnectedness of Dretske's work in epistemology and his more contemporary ideas on philosophy of mind, shedding light on the links which can be made between the two. The first section (...) of the book argues the point that knowledge consists of beliefs with the right objective connection to facts; two essays discuss this conception of knowledge's implications for naturalism. The next section articulates a view of perception, attempting to distinguish conceptual states from phenomenal states. A naturalized philosophy of mind, and thus a naturalized epistemology, is articulated in the third section. This collection will be a valuable resource for a wide range of philosophers and their students, and will also be of interest to cognitive scientists, psychologists, and philosophers of biology. (shrink)
Fred Dretske (1999). Mental Causation. In The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, Volume 2: Metaphysics. Bowling Green: Philosophy Doc Ctr.
Materialist explanations of cause and effect tend to embrace epiphenomenalism. Those who try to avoid epiphenomenalism tend to deny either the extrinsicness of meaning or the intrinsicness of causality. I argue that to deny one or the other is equally implausible. Rather, I prefer a different strategy: accept both premises, but deny that epiphenomenalism is necessarily the conclusion. This strategy is available because the premises do not imply the conclusion without the help of an additional premise—namely, that behavior explained by (...) reasons is caused by the reasons that explain it—and this premise is false. (shrink)
In this provocative book, Fred Dretske argues that to achieve an understanding of the mind it is not enough to understand the biological machinery by means of...
There are two ways to think about knowledge: From the bottom-up point of view, knowledge is an early arrival on the evolutionary scene; it is what animals need in order to coordinate their behavior with the environmental conditions. The top-down approach, departing from Descartes, considers knowledge constituted by a justified belief which gains its justification only in so far as the process by means of which it is reached conforms to canons of sciemific inference and rational theory choice. Keith Lehrer's (...) epistemology is analyzed as a top-down intemahst position and criticised with examples that show that in certain cases obviously knowledge is attained without meeting the standards for reliability of sources and processing of the required informantion. (shrink)
In this lucid portrayal of human behavior, Fred Dretske provides an original account of the way reasons function in the causal explanation of behavior.
By examining the general conditions in which a structure could come to represent another state of affairs, it is argued that beliefs, a special class of representations, have their contents limited by the sort of information the system in which they occur can pick up and process. If a system — measuring instrument, animal or human being — cannot process information to the effect that something is Q, it cannot represent something as Q. From this it follows (for simple, ostensively (...) acquired concepts at least) that if an organism has the concept Q, if it can believe that things are Q, then it is the kind of organism that has the information-processing capabilities for knowing that something is Q. (shrink)
This book presents an attempt to develop a theory of knowledge and a philosophy of mind using ideas derived from the mathematical theory of communication developed by Claude Shannon. Information is seen as an objective commodity defined by the dependency relations between distinct events. Knowledge is then analyzed as information caused belief. Perception is the delivery of information in analog form (experience) for conceptual utilization by cognitive mechanisms. The final chapters attempt to develop a theory of meaning (or belief content) (...) by viewing meaning as a certain kind of information-carrying role. (shrink)
Two general approaches to the analysis of knowledge are distinguished: a liberal view that takes the truth of what is known as a condition independent of the justificatory condition, and a conservative view that regards the truth of what is known as implied by the level of justification required for knowledge. Chisholm is classified as a liberal on perceptual knowledge, and his analysis is criticized from a conservative standpoint.
