True Belief plus Adequate Information: strengthening Foley’s View
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15448/1984-6746.2015.3.24284Keywords:
Knowledge. Information. Relevance.Abstract
In When is Knowledge True Belief? (2012), Richard Foley offers an original and extraordinarily simple theory of knowledge which intends to overcome its rivals and reorient the theory of knowledge: a subject S knows some proposition p if and only if S truly believes that p and does not lack any important information. Michael Hannon, in his article “Is True Belief Knowledge Plus Adequate Information?” (2013), puts forward an objection to Foley’s view which charges him of offering a circular argument that fails to distinguish important information from unimportant information without ultimately making reference to knowledge. I believe the theory presented by Foley is on the right track; however, it is incomplete. In this article I present a subjective interpretation of epistemic relevance, originally proposed by Floridi, which is capable of complementing the view proposed by Foley and to reject the objection presented by Hannon.
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