Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Epistemological Practice And The Internalism/Externalism Debate, James Mcbain

Faculty Submissions

The dialogue between internalists who maintain a belief is a case of knowledge when that which justifies the belief is within the agent’s first-person perspective and externalists who maintain epistemic justification can be in part, or entirely, outside the agent’s first-person perspective has been part of the epistemological literature for some time with one side usually attempting to show how the other side is mistaken. Edward Craig argues the internalist/externalist debate is flawed from the outset. Specifically, both internalism and externalism should be incorporated into the correct analysis of knowledge once we revamp that project. The epistemological project, according to …

Epistemic Analysis And The Possibility Of Good Informants, James Mcbain

Faculty Submissions

Edward Craig has proposed that epistemology should eschew traditional

conceptual analysis in favor of what he calls “conceptual synthesis.” He

proposes we start not from the finding of necessary and sufficient conditions

that match our intuitions; rather we start from considerations on what the

concept of knowledge does for us. In this paper I will explore one aspect of

Craig’s proposal – the good informant. It is this aspect that is central to

Craig’s epistemic method and perhaps most problematic. I will evaluate this

concept by first articulating three initial worries that some have had about

the concept and then …