What knowledge is and whether we have any.
11 topics · 16 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
The Ethics of Belief
William Kingdon Clifford · 1877
It is wrong always, everywhere and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence, because careless believing corrodes the whole community's…
+2 more at this level
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?
Edmund Gettier · 1963
Gives two cases where a belief is true, justified and yet clearly not knowledge, showing the classical tripartite analysis of knowledge is false as…
Primary sources and full treatments.
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
David Hume · 1748
Causation is a habit of expectation rather than an observed necessity, and induction has no non-circular justification.
+11 more at this level
12 of 16 works
William Kingdon Clifford
It is wrong always, everywhere and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence, because careless believing corrodes the whole community's habits of enquiry.
link checked 17 Sept 2026William James
Where a choice between hypotheses is live, forced and momentous and evidence cannot settle it, a person is entitled to let passional nature decide rather than wait in suspended judgement.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Bertrand Russell
Asks whether there is any knowledge so certain no reasonable person could doubt it, and works through appearance, matter and universals to argue that philosophy's value lies in the questions themselves.
about 3 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Edmund Gettier
Gives two cases where a belief is true, justified and yet clearly not knowledge, showing the classical tripartite analysis of knowledge is false as it stands.
link checked 17 Sept 2026David Hume
Causation is a habit of expectation rather than an observed necessity, and induction has no non-circular justification.
Assumes some acquaintance with what Locke claimed about ideas — Hume is dismantling it
about 4 hours to readlink checked 17 Sept 2026Thomas Reid
Argues that trusting testimony is as basic and unreducible a source of belief as trusting perception, since a principle of credulity to believe others and a principle of veracity to speak truth are both original parts of the human constitution.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026C. I. Lewis
Knowledge rests on a bedrock of immediate, non-inferential experience plus a priori categories the mind itself supplies, defended as conceptual pragmatism against both pure rationalism and pure empiricism.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Alvin Goldman
Proposes that a true belief counts as knowledge only when it is connected to the fact that makes it true by an appropriate causal chain, offered as a direct fix for the cases Gettier raised.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Laurence BonJour
Argues that reliabilism cannot be the whole story about justification, because a reliable but cognitively inaccessible process can produce belief that still looks epistemically irrational from the inside.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Ernest Sosa
Argues the foundationalist-coherentist debate is a false dichotomy, and sketches a virtue-based alternative in which a belief is justified when it flows from a stable, reliable intellectual disposition.
Hilary Putnam
Argues that the sceptical hypothesis that we are brains in a vat is self-undermining, because a genuine brain in a vat could never have the word 'vat' refer to real vats in the first place.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Helen Longino
Objectivity in science is not the absence of values but a property of a community's critical practices, achieved through open, responsive exchange among differently situated inquirers rather than by any individual mind alone.