How to Know: A Practicalist Conception of Knowledge

Some key aspects of contemporary epistemology deserve to be challenged, and How to Know does just that. This book argues that several long-standing presumptions at the heart of the standard analytic conception of knowledge are false, and defends an alternative view. The result is a new conception of knowledge, according to which: knowledge is a kind of knowledge-how; Gettiered knowledge is possible (and so we may set aside epistemology’s long-standing Gettier problem); knowledge admits of degrees or grades; and knowledge might not have to include epistemically justified belief. This is a distinctively practicalist conception of knowledge: knowledge is a complex ability, able to be stronger or weaker without having to be justificatory. On this view, knowledge is as knowledge can do.