Abstract
Philosophers must not be allowed to confuse epistemic and doxastic concepts. It is their duty to clarify the subtle interconnections between knowledge and belief. As this is too formidable a task for a single paper, I will not develop an epistemological theory of my own, but rather focus on Keith Lehrer’s influential theory of knowledge as elaborated in his 1990 bookTheory of Knowledge.This book represents only one stage of the development of Lehrer’s epistemology. It is the successor of, and shows considerable overlap with, a book with the titleKnowledgepublished by the same author in 1974. The basic structure of the 1990 definition of `knowledge’ is later retained in Lehrer 1997, Chapter 2, and duplicated in an analogous definition of `wisdom’. The recent second edition ofTheory of Knowledge(Lehrer 2000) presents a concept of knowledge that is much simplified as compared to the one of the first edition.’ The present paper, however, is based mainly on the more `dynamic’ 1990 version of Lehrer’s book. Its purpose is, first, to draw attention to some problematic features of Lehrer’s account and, second, to argue that a proper understanding of knowledge does not only require an understanding of beliefsimpliciter, but in addition a thorough understandingof the dynamics of belief.
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Rott, H. (2003). Lehrer’s Dynamic Theory of Knowledge. In: Olsson, E.J. (eds) The Epistemology of Keith Lehrer. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 95. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-0013-0_14
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