25 Marker Essay plans Philosophy A level (Epistemology)
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Course
Epistemology
Institution
AQA
In this document it contains detailed well written 25 mark philosophy plans for the Epistemology section of the course. These plans have been vetted by teachers and contain paragraph on paragraph essay structure.
25 marker can often be th emost difficult part of the Exam but these 25 marker plans ...
Intro: Define the different type of knowledge
There are 3 types of knowledge. Ability knowledge is knowledge of how to do something.
Acquaintance knowledge is knowledge of a place, person or thing. Propositional
knowledge is knowing whether a claim/proposition is true or false, this is the type of
knowledge I will be discussing.
Roadmap: Look about the tripartite view - JTB - weakest account of knowledge - Gettier
counterexamples - Move onto infallibilism - stronger account - avoids Gettier
counterexamples - however, rises the bar for knowledge too high - better than the JTB but
intuitively we feel like we know more - Look at reliabilism - a view of knowledge that
doesn’t raise the bar so high - aligns with our common sense view - Fake barns - strongest
objection to any account of knowledge - the inclusion of a sensitivity condition -
strengthening Reliabilism - Conclude Reliabilism provides the strongest account of
knowledge
R1: The tripartite view
- It is the view of knowledge that knowledge consists of justified true belief
- True as it must be a factually true statement
- Justified as you have reasonable evidence to belief in it
- Belief as you believe that this is a true justified statement
- All these conditions are individually necessary and sufficient conditions for it to be
considered knowledge
Obj 1: Gettier Counterexample
- Attacks the JTB claiming there are examples of true justified beliefs
- Smith and Jones are applying for a job.
- Smith notices Jones has 10 coins in his pocket, he also notices that Jones does
better in the interview
- He makes the claim “The man with 10 coins in his pocket will get the job”
- However, unbeknownst to Smith, he also has 10 coins and ends up getting the job
- Therefore, he had a true justified belief that would be considered knowledge under
the JTB
- This outlines how the JTB provides an unconvincing view of what knowledge could
be
R2: Infallibilism
- Stronger account of knowledge as it raises the bar
- This view claims that the knowledge must not be rationally doubted
- Therefore, the Gettier counterexample is not viable to this as Smith could rationally
doubt this claim
- This makes the account of knowledge to avoid “lucky beliefs”
- We must be certain in our beliefs
Obj 2:
- However, the issue with this view is it rises the bar from knowledge too high
- We intuitively believe we know more things than what infallibilist view claims
- Raising the bar for knowledge for what cannot be rationally doubted only allows for
tautological views
, - We believe we have more of a breadth of knowledge
- This makes the infallibilist view of knowledge not viable due to the high strength
and condition of knowledge
R3: Reliabilism
- This view beliefs in the RTB
- Knowledge is a true belief that comes from a reliable cognitive process that
produces a high ratio of true beliefs
- This does not require the high benchmark for knowledge
- But this avoids gettier counterexample as Smith cannot deem his process as
reliable cognitive process due to him not actually seeing the gold coins
- This aligns closer to our common sense view of knowledge
- The strongest view of knowledge in that sense
Obj 3: Fake barns
- The strongest argument to the views of knowledge is from the fake barns example
- In Fake barns county, there is fake barns that look identical to real barns
- Henry is driving through fake barns county unaware of this
- However, when Henry makes the claim, “there is a barn here”, this is a true belief
brought from a reliable cognitive process
- However, we would not want to consider this knowledge
- Fake barns shows how Reliabilism cannot fully encapsulate knowledge as these
lucky beliefs still are not removed
R3.5:
- However, Reliabilism can traverse this by adding a sensitivity condition
- This makes the claim sensitive to the truth
- For example, if Henry was aware that he was in fake barn county, he would not
have made that claim
- His original belief would be altered sensitive to the scenario he was in
- He would not claim that he did not know that it was a barn
- This extra condition makes the existence of lucky beliefs like this not knowledge
- This adjusts the Reliabilist account of knowledge making it convincing and the best
view of knowledge
Conclude: Reiterate roadmap and how it was dealt - Claim the upshot of this essay is that
Reliabilism is the best view of knowledge as it aligns with our common sense view of
knowledge and does not allow for lucky beliefs with the existence of sensitivity condition.
Is direct realism convincing?
Intro: Define Direct Realism
The common-sense view of how perception works. This view believes that we view mind-
independent objects directly with all their properties.
Roadmap: Look at the objections from hallucinations and illusions - Weak objection as
Direct Realists can subvert it - Perceptual variation response - Look at the objection from
time-lag - another weak argument - stronger than hallucinations - still direct realism can
still say we are directly perceiving them no matter the time - only against naive direct
realism - argument from perceptual variation - direct realism will use relational properties
again - but this response is insufficient this time - indefinite amount of perceptions -
Conclude Direct Realism fails to provide a convincing account of perception
(May switch obj 1 and 2 around)
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