The Student Room Group

Philosophy

1. TRUE or FALSE: Ayer defends the traditional "justified true belief" analysis of knowledge; on his formulation of it, if a claim is true, you're sure it's true, and you have the "right" to be sure it's true, you know it—and you only know it if all three of these conditions hold.
2. TRUE or FALSE: According to Ayer, you can only know the truth of a mathematical statement (such as that the angles of a triangle add up to 180°) if you can give a full proof of it; being able to give the correct answer, based on having learned it in the past from an authoritative source, isn't enough.
3. TRUE or FALSE: According to Ayer, you only have the right to be sure of something if you know exactly how you know it; e.g., he says that someone who could confidently and reliably predict lottery numbers with 100%accuracy, based on a feeling or "intuition," couldn't be said to really know what those numbers will be.
4. TRUE or FALSE: In Gettier's example, Smith believes a truth ("The man who will get the job has 10 coins in his pocket") based on the fact that it follows logically from something he has good reason to believe, but is false.
5. TRUE or FALSE: The point of Gettier's example is to show that having the right to be sure is not necessary for knowledge, and that any true belief counts as knowledge.
8. TRUE or FALSE: If we let p = you are not a brain in a vat, then substituting this into Nozick's third condition (3) results in "If you were a brain in a vat, you wouldn't believe you were not"; Nozick's analysis implies that this statement must be true for you to know that you're not a brain in a vat.
Reply 1
1. True.
2. True. This is elaborated on in The Problem of Knowledge, but I don't have a copy to hand to cite the pages.

3. False. This from the SEP (because have a copy of The Problem of Knowledge to hand):

'The account offered was intended as an analysis of knowledge, but revealingly Ayer did not require that believers be aware of how they have the right to be sure. It was allowed that somebody who invariably correctly predicted the outcome of a lottery could be said to know that their prediction was true, even though they, nor anyone else, had any idea of how the predictions came to be reliable. Ayer admitted that this case, and others like it, may cause some dispute: it was not clearly covered by the meaning of the term ‘knowledge’, and so left room for some stipulation.'

4. True.
5. False. A true belief might not be knowledge at all. Gettier challenged JTBs as knowledge, but he did not to my knowledge say what 'knowledge' actually is or consists in when challenging them.
8(?!). Nozick's wider analysis (truth tracking) excludes the Closure Principle, and so he would answer that you cannot know that you are not a brain in a vat, you can only believe it - this stands whether or not the statement is true or false. See here for more on this.
(edited 6 years ago)
Reply 2
It's been a long time since I read any Ayer though, so check these against your own discriminative faculties.

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