Defining Knowledge: Method and Metaphysics [Paperback]

This Element asks whether modalized epistemology can succeed, in order to gain insight into knowing's essence.This Element asks whether modalized epistemology - proposing and debating modally explicable conditionals with suitably epistemic content, as needing to be added to 'true belief' in order to define or understand knowing's nature - can succeed.This Element asks whether modalized epistemology - proposing and debating modally explicable conditionals with suitably epistemic content, as needing to be added to 'true belief' in order to define or understand knowing's nature - can succeed.Post-Gettier epistemology is increasingly modalized epistemology  proposing and debating modally explicable conditionals with suitably epistemic content (an approach initially inspired by Robert Nozick's 1981 account of knowledge), as needing to be added to 'true belief' in order to define or understand knowing's nature. This Element asks whether such modalized attempts  construed as responding to what the author calls Knowing's Further Features question (bequeathed to us by the Meno and the Theaetetus)  can succeed. The answer is that they cannot. Plato's and Aristotle's views on definition reinforce that result. Still, in appreciating this, we might gain insight into knowing's essence. We might find that knowledge is, essentially, nothing more than true belief.Preface; 1. A Quest; 2. An Hypothesis; 3. Modalized Epistemology; 4. Knowing's Further Features Question; 5. Knowledge and Luck; 6. An Aristotelian Strengthening of the Argument; 7. Knowledge-Minimalism; References.