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Books

Knowledge by Ian Evans and Nicholas D. Smith

Nick Everitt is uncertain about a book on Knowledge.

Over the past half century or so, many investigations into knowledge by philosophers have tried to provide a logical analysis of sentences of the form ‘S [a person] knows that p [an assertion or statement]’. More specifically, they have looked for a set of individually necessary and jointly sufficiently conditions for the truth of sentences of that form, that is, for knowledge. There has been almost universal agreement that two of the necessary conditions for knowledge are that S believes that p is true, and that p is true. But beliefs can happen to be true without being knowledge. It is a convention to describe the final condition or set of conditions which turns true belief into knowledge as the ‘warrant’ to call that belief knowledge.

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