Ralph Wedgwood's blog

In defence of adherence

What more is required of a belief, besides being justified and true (JTB), if the belief is to count as knowledge? In my view, at least two further conditions are required: the belief must meet the conditions of safety and adherence.

Safety is popular these days: it has been defended by many distinguished epistemologists, such as Duncan Pritchard and Timothy Williamson, among others. But adherence – the fourth condition that Robert Nozick imposed on knowledge – has few defenders. Most of the philosophers who have discussed adherence have rejected it. In this post, I defend adherence against its detractors.

Against Ideal Theory

In many of the normative and evaluative branches of philosophy, philosophers have devised “ideal theories”—e.g. theories of what it is for an agent to be ideally virtuous, or of what it is for someone to think in an ideally rational way, or of what it is for a society to be an ideally just “well-ordered society”.

As I shall argue here, such ideal theories are methodologically problematic, and often lead philosophers to make serious mistakes, both at the theoretical level and at the level of evaluating particular concrete phenomena.