User:Dominic Mayers/sandbox/work in progress

The pages User:Dominic_Mayers/sandbox/Notes on epistemology and User:Dominic_Mayers/sandbox/Historical context, especially the Notes on epistemology (which I wrote first), are a kind of brainstorming for the content of the article Epistemology. I do not expect that many, if any, editors will read them. What follows is also a brainstorming, but hopefully it will get closer to a concrete plan for the article. It is about one section, but the idea is to list the key attributable views on epistemology or aspects of epistemology and see how to present them in a well organized manner. I tried to make this brainstorming useful as a way to modify the article.

The first paragraph

The problem with that first paragraph is that it presents one very limited interpretation of Plato's philosophy as if it was the truth. There is a need to find the notorious main views on the different aspects of epistemology and not present them as truth. The use of Plato's philosophy to motivate the analysis of knowledge as justified true belief is one of these aspects. There is clearly plenty of notorious sources that say this is a legend or a myth. For example, Dutant called this the "legend of the justified true belief analysis". The article presents these biases as truth. Yes, superficially, it seems to make sense that Plato considered the definition of knowledge as justified true belief, but actually many say that Plato has a completely different perspective on knowledge. For example, Jessica Moss wrote

One need only step back from recent analytic Plato scholarship to see that [...] the identification of Plato’s epistêmê and doxa with knowledge and belief, standard as it has become, is only a recent development, and has already faced forceful criticism.

Similarly, Maria Rosa Antognazza wrote

This strand of thought is characterized by key distinctions between the intelligible and the sensible, reality and appearance, knowledge and belief. In short, one of the main thrusts of Platonism (at least as historically interpreted) is the intuition that knowledge and belief are different in kind, distinguished by two different powers or faculties.

There is not even a need to have the views of Jessica Moss and Maria Rosa Antognazza to see that the view presented is biased. It should be obvious that it makes no sense to try to see the modern justified true belief analysis in the ancient Plato's theory of knowledge. These guys were speaking of recollection of eternal knowledge from previous existence.

Adding Aristotle

The entry Epistemology in Britannica online has a nice section on Aristotle. Stephen Hetherington's chapter EPISTEMOLOGY’S PAST HERE AND NOW in Epistemology: The Key Thinkers edited by himself is a good example of a source that says Aristotle was doing philosophy just like in contemporary epistemology. In this chapter, Hetherington says nothing about fundamental differences that might have existed.

The second paragraph

The first sentence is:

During the subsequent Hellenistic period, philosophical schools began to appear which had a greater focus on epistemological questions, often in the form of philosophical skepticism.

It says implicitly that Hellenistic skepticism is a part of what we consider epistemology today. Given that knowledge in ancient Greek was not the same as it is in the contemporary "traditional" analysis of knowledge, this says that the scope is very large and covers all kinds of views on knowledge. In itself, this is fine, but, it does not help for the purpose of the section, which is to provide reference view points that help present other view points in the article. It should help us understand the actual scope of the article. Instead of suggesting an uniformity in epistemology from Plato to contemporary philosophy, the section should bring out the different views nowadays and in the history of philosophy and situate contemporary epistemology as covered in the article in that context. I am not defending at all any restriction on the scope. It's fine to suggest that the scope is very large (as long as the scope is actually very large, because otherwise it is a misrepresentation), but what this section needs to provide are specific views that constitute a context for the remainder of the article, not generalities.

Making the second paragraph more useful

One key view point that needs to be placed in a larger context is that knowledge is justified true belief. This view needs to be usefully related to Hellenistic skepticism. Perhaps there exists a contemporary view on ancient Greece skepticism that suggests that the purpose of skepticism is not to say that knowledge is impossible, but only that an epistemic warrant cannot always be required and therefore knowledge must some times be obtained differently. This would be consistent with Plato's recollection. I In his 2020 thesis dissertation, Charles Anthony Neil mentions that van Cleve consider that some belief can be self-justified:

Van Cleve (1985) uses epistemic supervenience to address the regress problem. Van Cleve maintains that epistemic supervenience implies that there are self-justified beliefs, writing that "A self-justified belief is not a belief that bestows upon itself the justification it already has; it is a belief that has for its justification-generator (or justifier) the fact of its own occurrence (together, of course, with its being the kind of belief that it is)" (1985, p). A self-justifying belief will be a belief which is justified in virtue of standing in relation to non-epistemic properties.

In my view, the language is misleading, because it suggests that knowledge is a belief that somehow does not need justification, but a belief is normally not knowledge. It might be a starting point for a learning or recollection process, but when we get to knowledge, we are not in a belief state anymore. It is related to Pure Coherentism as described by Todd R. Long:

Coherentists think of the structure of justified beliefs not like a house or pyramid supported by a foundation, but like a spider web in which the various nodes of the web are mutually supported by the whole web structure. Each belief in one’s set of beliefs depends for its justification on coherence relations among all of one’s beliefs. Accordingly, a belief is part of its own justification.

John Hawthorne and Dani Rabinowitz say that Timothy Williamson also uses the self-justified idea:

Williamson does not require that a belief be based on evidence. In the case where P is known, the belief can be ‘self-justified.’

Strangely, it is applied to a belief even though Williamson say that knowledge is first, i.e., if P is known, it is not to be analysed in terms of constituents such as a belief, etc. Anthony Brueckner describes Williamson's view more accurately:

According to Timothy Williamson, all evidence is knowledge, and all knowledge is evidence: E = K.

Williamson notion of knowledge first is well known, but I don't know if Williamson has made the link with the fact that it is an answer to ancient Greek skepticism. It would be very surprising if he did not. Yep, as I expected, Alvin I. Goldman is very clear on this point:

One of the chief attractions of E = K in Williamson’s eyes is the help it offers in dealing with skepticism.

Role of skepticism

There is another way to make skepticism more related to justified true belief or other central concepts in modern epistemology. Skepticism even in contemporary epistemology is central in making philosophers such as Williamson change fundamentally their view on knowledge. That is different than the (in my opinion strange) view that these ancient philosophers had only for purpose to claim that knowledge is not possible. In particular, Socrates's statement that he knew nothing is described as the inspiration for Pyrrhonian skepticism by philosophers, but Socrates valued people who knew how to do good things in the society. Katja Vogt wrote in the entry Ancient Skepticism of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

Contemporary philosophers sometimes discuss external world skepticism in terms of a paradox: one thinker finds herself torn between the strength of skeptical arguments and her ordinary convictions. For example, she thinks that this is her hand. But she concedes that the skeptical hypothesis that a mad scientist might have set things up so that she has such perceptions and thoughts (the so-called brain in a vat scenario) is hard to refute. This way of framing discussions of skepticism is foreign to antiquity. In antiquity, skeptics and their opponents are different thinkers, each of them with one set of intuitions, arguing against each other.

A similar view is maintained by Paul L. Heck:

at least more popularly, it is common to think of the towering figures of skepticism in Christian Europe of the modern period as heralds of secularism. Is that how they saw what they were doing? Figures who deployed skeptical argumentation for one purpose or another, such as Descartes, were certainly forerunners of modern scientific thinking, but only in hindsight can we think of them as secularists. Indeed, their skepticism was as much functional as it was existential. That is, it was not outright denial of truth claims but rather a stratagem to reconsider them within a new paradigm. It is no longer tenable to think of skepticism as the work of irreligious personalities undertaken to liberate themselves from religious authorities. Skepticism, we now know, is hardly limited to the “enlightened” ages of Ancient Greece and Modern Europe, past moments often taken as prototypes of contemporary secularism. The medieval period in Europe, generally perceived as a time of unquestioning faith, also had its brands of skepticism. Scholars associated with church circles made use of skeptical methods to call into question the supremacy of Aristotle’s standards for certainty.

In White (2010), it is said that Socrates's skeptical stance influenced Plato. Daniel Massey says:

It is also worth noting that, while skepticism has a pessimistic connotation, those who count themselves skeptics of one sort or another tend to find significant value in it. The ancient Greek philosopher Pyrrho of Elis (ca. 360–270 BCE), for example, advocated global skepticism as a cure for the dogmatic certainty which he located at the root of the ills of life. Socrates, though (arguably) not a (global) skeptic, shared the conviction that true wisdom lies in recognizing what one does not know (Plato [ca. 390 BCE] 2009). In the modern era, Russell echoes similar sentiments when he writes of a “liberating doubt” delivered through the vehicle of philosophy ([1912] 2013).

Gareth B. Matthews discusses Benson's view on Socrates's skepticism:

On Benson’s reading Socrates is a skeptic, not in the sense of believing that nothing can be known, but in the sense that, as he believes, he knows almost nothing and he has found only a few others who do know something, namely the artisans.

I need to understand this view of Kvanvig:

A similar worry applies to knowledge-first approaches. Once we abandon the idea that epistemology is investigating the scope of a term of ordinary language, we lose the standard basis for thinking there is some unified thing that all epistemologists are investigating. This point leaves every epistemology that claims to be or involve a theory of knowledge needing to tell us what kind of knowledge they intend to be talking about and what the point of talking about it is. It is worth noting that the purported benefits of a knowledge-first approach, especially its role in explaining action and practical reasoning, are most at home in the arena of natural philosophy. It takes an argument to show that this kind of knowledge is precisely the same as the kind challenged by the skeptic in the tradition going back to Plato and Socrates.

Timothy Chappell wrote:

[I]t is not clear that [Plato's] skepticism is complete. When Socrates famously wonders, at Republic 540d3, whether the city that he describes can ever come into being, it is perhaps not too fanciful to suggest that it is not just an ideal political system that he thinks it “certainly difficult—yet possible somehow” to realize. It is an epistemic system too. It is a striking difference between Plato’s way of thinking and our own that for him these possibilities stand or fall together.

Gail Fine wrote:

The claim that one knows that one knows nothing seems to be a contradiction. [...] Of course, not everyone attributes the claim to Socrates. In his book, Socrates, for example, Christopher Taylor says that doing so ‘is a clear misreading of Plato.’

Indeed Taylor wrote:

That Socrates denied having any knowledge, except the knowledge that he had no knowledge, became a catchword in antiquity. But that paradoxical formulation is a clear misreading of Plato. Though Socrates frequently says that he does not know the answer to the particular question under discussion, he never says that he knows nothing whatever, and indeed he makes some emphatic claims to knowledge, most notably in the Apology, where he twice claims to know that abandoning his divine mission would be bad and disgraceful (29b, 37b).

Nicholas D. Smith wrote:

Socrates uses ‘knowledge’ (epistēmē) in his disclaimers interchangeably with ‘wisdom’ (sophia), and not just any kind of wisdom, but specifically, wisdom about what he calls ‘the most important things’ ( Apology 22d7–8). In claiming not to have knowledge, accordingly, Socrates is not committing himself to global scepticism. Moreover, several passages may be found in which Socrates either claims to have knowledge of some sort, or credits others as having some knowledge or even wisdom.

The third paragraph

Here is the paragraph:

In ancient India the Ajñana school of ancient Indian philosophy promoted skepticism. Ajñana was a Śramaṇa movement and a major rival of early Buddhism, Jainism and the Ājīvika school. They held that it was impossible to obtain knowledge of metaphysical nature or to ascertain the truth value of philosophical propositions; and even if knowledge was possible, it was useless and disadvantageous for final salvation. They were specialized in refutation without propagating any positive doctrine of their own.

Even if that is the truth, points of view on ancient philosophy must be attributed. Again, this is a problem in the section. It presents points of view as truths. It also seems to be very selective in the views point that it presents. Moreover, no sources are provided. I just read the Epistemology in Classical Indian Philosophy entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy. It is a very natural source to start with. I would never say that it gives the truth, but it gives an academic view. The section on Epistemology does not say at all that Indian skepticism rejects the possibility of knowledge. It rejects the possibility of inference from perception. It says "Inference depends upon generalizations which outstrip perceptual evidence". It also says "The Cārvāka argument identifying the problem of induction is turned by both Buddhist and Nyāya philosophers into an argument for fallibilism about inference." However, skepticism does not reject valid inference. The entry says "But to accept that sometimes we reason in ways that mimic but fail to instantiate right forms is not to be a skeptic. Indeed, the very concept of a fallacy (hetv-ābhāsa) presupposes that of the veritable reason or sign (hetu), a veritable prover making us have new knowledge." This makes much more sense than what the current paragraph says. What I find most interesting is what the next section in the entry says. It is about "Knowing That You Know" and it begins with the following:

One of the philosophic problems that Nāgārjuna raised for epistemology has to do with an alleged regress of justification on the assumption that a pramāṇa is required in order to know and that to identify the source of a bit of knowledge is to certify the proposition embedded. Nāgārjuna claims that this is absurd in that it would require an infinite series of pramāṇa, of identification of a more fundamental pramāṇa for every pramāṇa relied on.

Mīmāṃsā and Vedānta philosophers argue that such a threat of regress shows that knowledge is self-certifying, svataḥ prāmāṇya.

This is exactly the point raised at the end of the previous subsection about the second paragraph. The idea that an infinite regress or other skeptical arguments are raised to infer that knowledge does not exist is nonsensical in comparison with the idea that these arguments are used to remove obstacles to the notion that knowledge is self-certifying.

The fourth paragraph

Here is the paragraph:

During the Islamic Golden Age, one of the most prominent and influential philosophers, theologians, jurists, logicians and mystics in Islamic epistemology was Al-Ghazali. During his life, he wrote over 70 books on science, Islamic reasoning and Sufism. Al-Ghazali distributed his book The Incoherence of Philosophers, set apart as a defining moment in Islamic epistemology. He shaped a conviction that all occasions and connections are not the result of material conjunctions but are the present and prompt will of God.

The two first sentences are more about Al-Ghazali than about Islamic epistemology. The third sentence only says that one of his book was important in Islamic epistemology. That is not useful as a context to describe contemporary view points on epistemology. The last sentence could be useful, but what it says is not clear and it is sourced in a 11th century primary source (recently translated).

Making the fourth paragraph more useful

The following is the view point of Charles Bolyard in Epistemology: The Key Thinkers (2019) :

During the cultural contact with the Islamic world that coincided with the crusades in the eleventh through the thirteenth centuries, Western scholars recovered all of the ‘lost’ texts of Aristotle that had been preserved by the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian thinkers who flourished there. Aristotelian thought, especially as interpreted by Islamic and Jewish philosopher/theologians, began to take over the curricula of the universities. Though there was still an emphasis on knowledge as the grasping of timeless universals, the means by which one reached this point was increasingly seen as the culmination of a complicated process that began in, and was impossible without, sensation. The Persian Muslim scholar Ibn-Sina (=Avicenna), who lived from 980 to 1037, and the Spanish Muslim scholar Ibn-Rushd (=Averroes), who lived from 1126 to 1198, were seen as significant philosophers in their own right;

John Turri, Mark Alfano and John Greco in the entry Virtue Epistemology of SEP wrote:

Islamic philosophy offers precursors to contemporary virtue epistemology, such as discussions of the epistemic value of imagination in al-Kindī and al-Fārābī (Adamson 2015) and Avicenna’s sophisticated social epistemology of reliable and unreliable testimony (Black 2013).

The entry Ancient Skepticism in SEP says:

Next to Augustine, Al-Ghazali (1085-1111) plays a major role in re-conceiving the questions relevant to skepticism (Menn 2003, Kukkonen 2009). In The Rescuer From Error, Al-Ghazali literally describes God as the rescuer from error (in Khalidi 2005). Like Augustine before and Descartes after him, Al-Ghazali moves through different cognitive faculties. Do the senses or reason allow us to gain knowledge? These questions are framed by the quest for knowledge of God. While Augustine thinks that knowledge of God comes through a combination of seeking God on the one hand and God’s grace on the other, Al-Ghazali thinks it comes through spiritual exercises. However, once confidence in God is secured, trust in the more familiar ways of gaining knowledge—sense perception, rational reasoning, and so on—is restored (for a detailed treatment of skepticism in Classical Islam, cf. Heck 2014). One key difference between ancient skepticism on the one hand, and medieval as well as Cartesian skepticism on the other, is that ancient skepticism is not framed by theological concerns. Note that in Cartesian skepticism, God is not only invoked when it comes to refuting skepticism. More importantly, the skeptical problems arise in a way that depends on God as creator. Our cognitive faculties are seen as created faculties, and the world as a created world. A kind of ‘faculty-skepticism’ that asks whether our cognitive faculties are built so as to be erroneous is formulated, and a potential gap between our minds and the world opens up. Perhaps God made us in such a way that we are fundamentally wrong about everything (or, as later secular versions have it, a mad scientist experiments on a “brain in a vat”).

The entry Medieval Skepticism in SEP says:

The thirteenth century saw the birth of Scholasticism in the Latin West. As Universities began to develop in such important centers of learning as Paris and Oxford, so too did highly formalized and argumentative styles of debate and writing. At the same time, some of the intellectual consequences of the Crusades came to play an important role in the history of skepticism: Muslim and Jewish scholars and writings came to the attention of Christians working on similar topics. Of particular importance was the translation of all of Aristotle’s works into Latin, along with many commentaries on them (as well as original works) by Ibn-Rushd (Averroes) and Ibn-Sina (Avicenna). With these texts came others (such as Al-Haytham’s Optics), and Christian scholars such as Roger Bacon began to investigate the cognitive process more thoroughly in their own writings. The dominant Augustinian theory of knowledge began to come under attack as the wealth of new accounts were contrasted, rejected, or synthesized. And as Augustine was reinterpreted, so too was his rejection of skepticism.

Henrik Lagerlund in Rethinking the History of Skepticism writes:

At the time al-Ghazālī writes, epistemological concerns had become central to Islamic theology, and skepticism under the disguise of sophistry was seen as a threat to religion. Al-Ghazālī agrees with all this and orients his own thinking towards finding a firm basis for his religion. He presents doubts about whether reason will be able to provide this firm basis. He provides five separate arguments for this, which bears strong similarities to Ancient skeptical arguments. None of these arguments are conclusive, however, and he thinks there is a cure for the disease of skepticism. Although, he emphasizes, our cognitive machinery seems to have a tendency to err.

In the same book, Taneli Kukkonen writes:

For Ghazālī, it is not merely special gifts such as prophetic inspiration and mystic visions that have their origin in the divine realm; the necessary truths do, too, and through them all other veracious cognitions. This is because in good Platonic fashion, Ghazālī believes that everything in the sensible world—everything that can be cognized and apprehended, anyway—is merely a reflection or an after-image of an intelligible archetype. And he believes that knowledge is ultimately about recollection: if knowledge required reaching up to the heavens or into the bowels of the earth, nobody could ever retrieve it, which is why our only hope lies in the truth being in our hearts all the time.

Heck in Skepticism in Classical Islam: Moments of confusion writes:

Skepticism is by no means the same as atheism. It is, rather, the admission that one cannot convincingly demonstrate a truth claim with certainty, and Islam’s scholars, like their counterparts in other times and places, acknowledged such impasses, only to be inspired by them to find new ways to resolve the conundrums they faced. While their conundrums were unique, their admission of the limits of knowledge shares much with other scholarly traditions. It is my hope that this study will encourage others to venture beyond conventional assumptions about the nature of religious reasoning and explore more closely how skepticism is very much part of the venture.

and later in the same book continues:

The story of skepticism in Islam is as much a drive for certainty as an admission of confusion, [...] inviting us to reconsider whether skeptical thinking in other contexts—ancient or modern—has ever been fully self-standing or whether it is better viewed more as a vital point of reference stimulating even greater efforts to answer the questions and enigmas about the nature of reality.

The fifth paragraph

Here is the paragraph:

After the ancient philosophical era but before the modern philosophical era, a number of Medieval philosophers also engaged with epistemological questions at length. Most notable among the Medievals for their contributions to epistemology were Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham.

My view about this paragraph is similar as in the case of the second paragraph: It suggests an uniformity in the concept of epistemology from Plato to contemporary philosophy, but that is not useful. It needs to be more specific so that it can serve as a point of comparison to describe contemporary views on epistemology.

Making the fifth paragraph more useful

Ayers and Antognazza say that for the great medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas, as it was the case for the ancient Greeks, knowledge and belief are of different kinds. Presenting Aquinas's view regarding a need for justification, Ayers and Antognazza wrote:

Our need of reasoning is a mark of imperfection. Angels ‘apprehend the truth directly and without discursive reasoning’.

In a footnote to that sentence they add:

God, it seems [to Aquinas], does not even have to universalize, since his thought is of things in their full particularity. Universals are creatures of human intellect [...]

The sixth and seventh paragraphs

Here are the paragraphs:

Epistemology came to the fore in philosophy during the early modern period. According to historian of philosophy Jan Woleński, the development of philosophy divides, with some exceptions, into the pre-Cartesian ontologically oriented and the post-Cartesian epistemologically oriented.

Historians of philosophy traditionally divide this period into a dispute between empiricists (including Francis Bacon, John Locke, David Hume, and George Berkeley) and rationalists (including René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Leibniz). The debate between them has often been framed using the question of whether knowledge comes primarily from sensory experience (empiricism), or whether a significant portion of our knowledge is derived entirely from our faculty of reason (rationalism). According to some scholars, this dispute was resolved in the late 18th century by Immanuel Kant, whose transcendental idealism famously made room for the view that "though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all [knowledge] arises out of experience".

I just read again the source given to verify the first sentence: the introduction by Jan Woleński to the Handbook of Epistemology edited by I. Niiniluoto, Matti Sintonen and himself. It is not sufficient to attribute the second sentence. The first sentence would have to be modified so that the view point is not expressed as a truth, but also attributed to Woleński. But this can easily be taken care of. There is a more fundamental issue. I don't see the point of mentioning this. Wolenski had a very specific purpose: he says clearly that he is giving a rational for the scope of his introduction: why he does not cover before Descartes. But, this is entirely the opposite of what the fifth previous paragraphs do in our case. So, that is not a valid purpose in our case. What could be useful is why Woleński thinks epistemology "came to the fore" with Descartes. That would be something more concrete than only "came to the fore". Perhaps the goal is to suggest that there is a continuity from the early modern period to contemporary epistemology. Indeed, it does suggest that epistemology (implicitly as we know it today) was there (and received a lot of attention) in the early modern period. In other words, the problem is that, as in the previous paragraphs, this paragraph and the next one contain nothing specific that can be used as a point of comparison to present contemporary views on epistemology, but instead only say a generality, which suggests, on the contrary, an uniformity in epistemology from the given period to contemporary philosophy.

The overall seventh paragraph indeed provides a basic background. The opposition between rationalism and empiricism is indeed important in the understanding of contemporary epistemology, but suggesting that it was resolved by Kant (without sources) is wrong. Also, Kant's distinction between "begins" and "arises out" is not well explained. These two paragraphs are not that helpful.

Epistemology came to the fore during the early modern period

A recent modification contributed to the creation of these paragraphs. It emphasized the importance of the early modern period for epistemology. It used Wolensky's entry The History of Epistemology in the Handbook of Epistemology of which he is one of the editor. Wolenski says that epistemology came to the fore with Descartes, Berkeley, etc. It is important to characterize more precisely what it is exactly that Wolensky appreciates about these philosophers that make them epistemologically oriented. This needs to be expressed more concretely so that the readers have useful information. Wolensky gives us some clues when he writes

In this sense, Descartes is the father of modern philosophy. In fact, cogito, ergo sum, whatever it is (a principle, inference or performance), clearly suggests that an ontological statement (I am) is based on an epistemological datum (I think). Similarly, Berkeley’s esse = percipi may be interpreted as an attempt to define an ontological category (existence, being) by an epistemological one (perception).

The key point seems to be a distinction between a cognition in one's mind (a thought, a perception) and a reality (the existence of a subject, the perceived object, etc.) But, this kind of distinctions has always been central in philosophy. For example, Aristotle distinguished between the intellect (nous) and matter (hulê). Aristotle was aware of the role of perception and that the intellect, not matter, was responsible for logical inference and induction. So, what is so special about the distinction seen by Wolensky? Perhaps, the nature of the intellect in Aristotle is different from its counterpart in contemporary epistemology. This is discussed in the entry Cartesianism of Britannica, section Mechanism versus Aristotelianism, and would be useful information for the readers.

The subsection Contemporary historiography

Before reading the two sources provided, this subsection seemed well sourced and pertinent. After reading the sources, it seemed a different subject, concerned by things that traditional English books on epistemology ignore. The two sources provided are about historical epistemology, history of epistemology, and how they relate. Traditional books on epistemology discuss the history of epistemology in the traditional sense, for example, they will discuss Descartes's historical approach to obtain certainty. The key point that was made in the above discussion of the six paragraphs is that the history of epistemology must be presented carefully, by giving all view points that can be useful to discuss contemporary epistemology. For example, this is why Dutant's view, Antognazza's view and Ayer's view must be presented. Naively, there is not much more to say: the history must be presented carefully and that's it. However. that subsection and the sources provided suggest that there is much more to say.

I went to see what was written about "historical epistemology" in the hope to see what more can be said. It seems to be a concern within "Social Epistemology" or within the French philosophical tradition introduced by Rey, Bachelelard and Canguilhem. For example, there are 78 different articles in The Routledge Companion To Epistemology edited by Sven Bernecker and Duncan Pritchard and "historical epistemology" is mentioned only in the 77th article, Social Epistemology, by Martin Kusch. The expression also appears in the 2017 book When Historiography Met Epistemology by Stefano Bordoni, a book that "deals with the emergence of a sophisticated history and philosophy of science in French-speaking countries in the second half of the nineteenth century." Jean-François Braunstein in the chapter Historical Epistemology, Old And New of Epistemology and History: From Bachelard and Canguilhem to Today’s History of Science says that the expression “historical epistemology” first appeared [in French] in the writings of [...] Abel Rey [... who] articulated ideas in a very clear way that would be later be taken up and developed in a more complex fashion by more original and important writers – in this instance Bachelard and Canguilhem." The expression is also mentioned once in A Companion to Epistemology (2010) edited by Jonathan Dancy, Ernest Sosa, and Matthias Steup, in the entry Genetic Epistemology by Richard F. Kitchener who only mentions it to point out that genetic epistemology is hard to distinguish from historical epistemology and other related fields:

All epistemologies are concerned with how knowledge changes over time. But no one yet has adequately distinguished the characteristics marking off the differences between genetic epistemology, evolutionary epistemology (see evolutionary epistemology), developmental epistemology and historical epistemology.

Moreover, this sentence refers to a particular meaning of "historical epistemology": the source provided, Sturm (2011), explains that "historical" has been used to qualify "epistemology" in different manners.

A plan to rewrite the history section with a view on the organisation of the entire article

A useful and easy to read article requires a clear focus and thus a scope that is well defined. The scope of epistemology is well defined by the key books and encyclopedia articles written by contemporary epistemologists. This includes the view of these contemporary epistemologists on its history. There is still a challenge, because the scope is nevertheless very large and it is very difficult to extract the key concepts and to organize them properly. History should help to obtain that global organization. For example, some history is provided by Floridi in The renaissance of Epistemology. That does not mean that the scope is restricted to the content of Floridi's article. It means that we organize content with the help of that historical perspective and other related historical perspectives. Of course, the expression "renaissance of epistemology" must be understood to mean "the birth of contemporary epistemology" or the beginning of this birth. Again, contemporary epistemology is what we cover and this includes its historical perspective. However, one must not confuse the perspective taken by contemporary epistemologists on past philosophies and the perspective taken by Floridi on the birth of contemporary epistemology. Both have an historical flavour, but the latter does not try to locate contemporary epistemological concepts inside ancient philosophies. It is very important to understand this distinction, because we could not reasonably organize the article in terms of perspectives taken by some contemporary epistemologists on ancient philosophies. These perspectives are view points, which are part of the content that needs to be organized, but are not necessarily central view points. They are views on ancient philosophies that are obtained from the standpoint of specific contemporary epistemological perspectives, some of them even criticized by other philosophers. Floridi's perspective is different. It is a view on (the birth of) contemporary epistemology from the perspective of the general history of philosophy, which is less polemic. This kind of distinction has been noted by others. For example, three historians, in a book about Ernst Mach who, they say, played a real but unnoticed role in contemporary epistemology, wrote:

[...] there can be noticeable differences when historians write about the history of philosophy and when philosophers write about it. Philosophers often look at the past with categories and interests taken from the present or at the least from the recent past, but many historians, especially those who love research for its own sake, will try to look at the past from a perspective either from that period or from even earlier.

An epistemological perspective and the questions raised under that perspective require a shared contextual background. The above mentioned distinction can be seen in the way that background is considered: When philosophers write about history they use that background without explaining how it emerged in its historical context. In contrast, historians focus more on that background, how it emerged, etc. For example, consider the first two sentences of the history section:

In Meno, the definition of knowledge as justified true belief appears for the first time. In other words, belief is required to have an explanation in order to be correct, beyond just happening to be right.

These two sentences ignore the complex debates that always existed around the nature of knowledge, but there is a more fundamental problem with them: they are written from the standpoint of a specific contemporary epistemological perspective without providing its historical background. A discussion of these complex debates, though useful and eventually necessary, is not in itself the solution to that problem, because they could be done under the same specific contemporary epistemological perspective in a similar way. In contrast, Floridi's analysis and related analyses try to fill that gap by explaining the new naturalistic attitude that emerged in the mid twentieth century and that hold stronger than ever in contemporary epistemology and is the foundation or background on the basis of which contemporary epistemology asks its questions.

The historical perspective on epistemology

Again, here we do not attempt to see any contemporary epistemological perspective in ancient philosophies. Instead, we look at how the current approach or angle of attack in epistemology emerged in the history of philosophy. Not surprisingly the response of Floridi can be summarized in one word: science. As Pierre Wagner also explains, the angle taken in epistemology is tightly connected to the role given to science in philosophy or to the kind of relation that exists between science and philosophy. One might say that it depends more generally upon the relation between philosophy and existing traditions of knowledge, but it seems inappropriate to refer to science as a tradition of knowledge among others. Besides, when we refer to the relation between philosophy and science, it includes indirectly its relation to metaphysical views from older traditions as well, but in a negative manner.

Until late in the 19th century, scientists were called philosophers. Before the twentieth century, the story of science versus philosophy is about how science came to exist independently from philosophy. The story starting from the early twentieth century goes as follows. In the early 20th century, the foundation of mathematics and logic received a lot of attention and philosophers such as Russell hoped that the totality of mathematics could be reduced to logic. There was even hope that the totality of science could be reduced to logic given basic observation statements, that is, that there is an inductive logic, that induction, unlike what Einstein said, would not be a creative process without any fixed path. Russell even said that there is no philosophical truth that is not scientific truth: there are not two kinds of knowledge, philosophical knowledge and scientific knowledge, but only scientific knowledge. However, no inductive logic was found. Given observations and a law, there is no method to accept or reject the law. The Duhem-Quine thesis says that one cannot even reject a law that contradicts observations without making assumptions on the apparatus (and our senses) and the laws behind them.

The internal/external connection

Nevertheless, science continued to provide the metaphysical view behind philosophy and epistemology: knowledge exists in the mind of individuals, itself produced by brains. Even Popper's World 3 of objective knowledge emerges from a World 2 of such subjective knowledge (including what he describes as expectations and predispositions in addition to individual propositional knowledge) that has itself emerged from Popper's World 1, which is the (physical) reality. For most philosophers, the value of internal propositional knowledge in brains depends on its correspondence with the reality. In this correspondence theory of truth, a statement is true if it is the case in the reality. The brain is a physical reality that interacts with the reality, including itself, and so is the knowledge within it, but that interaction excludes metaphysical processes such as divine revelations, because science does not work under that kind of conjectures. As previously mentioned, philosophers even searched for an inductive logic to remove the need for creativity and intuition in science. That failed, but this does not mean that some forms of revelations is involved in the inductive process. This failure is explained by the complexity of the human brain and of its inner interaction.

Even with the acceptance of the role of creativity and intuition in the generation of knowledge, the metaphysical view on the created epistemological content is that it is separated from the reality and the value of the propositional knowledge within it depends on how it is connected with that reality. For example, one philosopher, Robert Nozick, required a very strong connection with the reality as a condition for propositional knowledge. His four conditions for S's knowing that P were (S=Subject / P=Proposition):

1. P is true
2. S believes that P
3. If it were the case that (not-P), S would not believe that P
4. If it were the case that P, S would believe that P

The last two counterfactual conditions are very strong requirement on the connection with the reality.

Relation with contemporary epistemological concepts

This is where I test the idea that a historical perspective will help organize the contemporary epistemological concepts and place them into a larger context. The internalism/externalism opposition is clearly introduced and that is an important one. What about the "belief" concept. In the section Belief of the article Epistemology, the relation "S believes that P" between a subject S and a proposition P is given different meanings, but this section fails to explain the notion of belief itself in a more general context. Its first sentence sets the tone: "One of the core concepts in epistemology is belief. " I just started to review the notion of belief in epistemology and clearly there are philosophers who think, at the least historically, that on the contrary the concept of belief should play no rôle in epistemology. For example, Wolfgang Stegmüller wrote that for Carnap:

Just as in deductive logic the psychological concept of necessary connection between thoughts (ideas) was replaced by the objective concept of logical entailment, so here the concept of degree of belief must be replaced by that of partial logical consequence.