(March 27, 2021 at 11:35 am)Angrboda Wrote:(March 27, 2021 at 2:26 am)vulcanlogician Wrote: There is a whole field of philosophy devoted to this. It's called "epistemology." It is a matter of rigorous debate upon what basis we have knowledge.
A pretty solid theory is correspondence theory. It says that knowledge is a "justified true belief."
Just to be precise, the correspondence theory is a theory of truth, not knowledge. According to correspondence theory, what makes something true is that it corresponds to a state of affairs in reality. There are other theories of truth. The justified true belief bit I believe started with Plato, and it's long been known to be inadequate, but it get's the lion's share of what needs to be in a definition of knowledge right. For a bit about the inadequacy, look into the Gettier problem.
Whoops. I've actually have been mixing that up for quite some time.
Well, I knew that correspondence theory was about beliefs corresponding to the world. I also knew it was from the analytic school too. But I took it to be an updated version of the Greek postulate. I guess I was wrong there. Thanks for correcting me.