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Sources of Knowledge

The Philosophical Method of Exception

Peter Keeble spotlights and critiques a common philosophical technique.

One of the ways philosophy works is this. You define some useful concept, such as knowledge, or morality, or inductive reasoning. Then someone comes along with an example of knowledge, or a moral act, or a property concerning inductive prediction that seems to lie beyond those defining characteristics. This happened not so long ago in all these cases. Knowledge was well established as ‘justified true belief’ until Edmund Gettier’s brief 1963 article ‘Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?’ gave apparent counter-examples.

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