Epistemology (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

The SEP’s survey entry on epistemology, by Matthias Steup (Colorado) and Ram Neta (North Carolina). First published December 2005; last substantive revision October 2024.

This is the spoke’s first source page — every page before it was a Thing page built from a Wikipedia URL in frontmatter, with nothing for a tier: to attach to. It is also the spoke’s first T1: SEP entries are commissioned from specialists and refereed by a subject editor before publication, and are kept under revision by the author rather than frozen at print.

The framing: cognitive success

Steup and Neta open not with knowledge but with a wider category. Epistemology “seeks to understand one or another kind of cognitive success (or, correspondingly, cognitive failure)” — knowledge is the most-studied instance, not the whole subject. Justification, evidence, rationality and understanding are the others.

That framing matters for this spoke because it makes rationalism a thesis about the sources of cognitive success, not a freestanding doctrine: reason rather than the senses is what delivers it.

Three kinds of knowledge

The entry distinguishes them before analysing any:

1. Acquaintance — knowing a person, place or thing directly, as distinct from knowing facts about it.
2. Know-how — the practical ability to do something. Whether this reduces to factual knowledge is still argued.
3. Propositional knowledge — knowing that something is the case. The overwhelming bulk of the literature, and the only one of the three the JTB analysis is about.

JTB and Gettier

The traditional analysis: you know that p when p is true, you believe p, and your belief is justified. Edmund Gettier showed the three together are not sufficient — “there are cases of JTB that are not cases of knowledge.” The entry’s barn-facade case is the standard illustration: a true, justified belief that is right by luck, and luck is what knowledge is supposed to exclude.

Gettier is the hinge on which the rest of the entry turns. The internalism/externalism and foundationalism/coherentism disputes below are, in large part, competing accounts of what the justification condition would have to be to survive it.

Two structural disputes

Internalism vs. externalism. Is justification fixed entirely by what is going on inside the subject’s mind? The internalist test case is the envatted duplicate: a brain in a vat with your exact mental life is, on internalism, exactly as justified as you are, because “justification is determined solely by those internal factors.” Externalists deny it — reliability of the belief-forming process is an external matter and it bears on justification.

This is the same disagreement Nietzsche’s perspectivism attacks from outside: he does not choose between internal and external justification, he denies there is a view from nowhere against which either could be checked. Recorded on this spoke as a live tension, not a resolved one.

Foundationalism vs. coherentism. The entry gives each its metaphor. Foundationalism makes knowledge “a building” — basic beliefs at the base, which do not draw their justification from other beliefs, supporting everything else. Coherentism makes it “a web where the strength of any given area depends on the strength of the surrounding areas,” with no belief foundational and all justification relational.

The argument for foundationalism is the regress: chains of justification cannot run backwards forever and cannot circle, so something has to stop them. That argument is the formal skeleton of Descartes’ method — methodic doubt is a search for a belief the regress cannot get behind, and the cogito is offered as one. Descartes is doing foundationalism two centuries before the label, which is why the mind-body-problem page can treat his substance dualism and his epistemology as one project.

Skepticism

Two kinds, and the entry is careful to keep them apart. General skepticism challenges a whole type of cognitive success. Selective skepticism targets a domain (the past, other minds) or a faculty (perception, memory) while leaving the rest standing. Steup and Neta’s reading of the modern field is that most of it is a reply to one skeptical challenge or another — skepticism as the discipline’s standing agenda rather than a position many people hold.

Connections

• surveys epistemology — the branch this spoke names in its domain and had not paged
• the regress argument formalizes Descartes’ methodic doubt
• rationalism is a thesis about which source delivers cognitive success
• Nietzsche’s perspectivism denies the neutral standpoint both sides of the internalism/externalism dispute assume