Tim De Mey

The Quest for Truth

An Introduction to Epistemology

1 • introduction

S uppose, for the sake of the argument, that the White House is occu-
pied by a bully president, whose blunt lies not only ever increase in
number but also in preposterousness. Or suppose that, to subvert the
call for political or legislative action, “merchants of doubt” call into doubt
well-established scientific facts such as climate change or evolution. Or
suppose that almost every dramatic, politically sensitive event triggers a
proliferation of conspiracy theories. Or suppose that journalists and the
media continuously get bad press because they are accused of producing
fake news. Or still, suppose that although in theory, communication tech-
nology allows for maximum freedom of expression of opinion in an ideal
marketplace of ideas, in practice, the real marketplace of ideas blocks
rather than facilitates the free and open exchange of views.
Our handful of examples illustrates that one needs little imagination
to conceive of real-world situations in which finding out what is true, and
what isn’t, is of pivotal, societal importance. Can philosophers be of any
help in this quest for truth? Philosophers have always been mesmerized
by truth. Part of their interest in truth is focused not on trying to find
out what is true and what isn’t, but rather on the end-products of such
inquiries, i.e., knowledge, to know what is true and what isn’t. In this
context, philosophers have developed and defended different theories
of knowledge, i.e., rival views on the nature, value, possibility, structure,
sources, and kinds of knowledge.

I am very grateful to Maureen Sie, Bart Engelen, Lodi Nauta and Martin van Hees
for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this chapter, and for their editorial
patience and dedication.

Quote-left Envelope �
9. the quest for truth

The subdomain of philosophy that is concerned with the theory of

knowledge is called epistemology, from the Greek word episteme, knowl-
edge. It’s one of the two pillars of theoretical philosophy, the other being
metaphysics (see chapter on ontology). Other subdomains in theoretical
philosophy, like, e.g., philosophy of science (see chapter on philosophy
of science) or philosophy of mind (see chapter on philosophy of mind),
raise epistemological and metaphysical questions in more specific con-
texts like science and the mind. One might even argue that in practical
philosophy as well, the most fundamental philosophical questions are,
deep down, epistemological and metaphysical questions. For example,
when we evaluate someone’s actions morally, their intentions often play
an important role, but can we ever know someone’s true intentions? And
what about moral responsibility? Is such a thing even possible when free
will and causal determinism seem to be incompatible with one another?
In this chapter, we will consider some big questions in epistemology. In
Sections 2 and 3, we will discuss answers to the following questions: What
is knowledge and is knowledge possible at all? Subsequently, in Sections 4
and 5, we shall look at opposing accounts of justification. Reliabilism, the
account of justification discussed in Section 5, shifts our attention away
from accounts of what knowledge is to the methods by which we acquire
it and that most often result in true beliefs. In the last section, we shall
suggest that if epistemology aspires to be of some fundamental help in
solving pressing real-world problems, like the ones mentioned above, it
should focus more on the context of inquiry by unraveling and pinpoint-
ing “heuristics,” or problem-solving strategies, and by aligning these novel
findings with the earlier results from traditional epistemology.

2 • right for the wrong reasons

One of the central problems in epistemology is the analysis of knowledge,

i.e., the question “What is knowledge?” According to the traditional analy-
sis, which has already been considered in Plato’s Theaetetus, the epistemic
subject S knows the proposition that p if and only if (1) S believes that p,
(2) p is true or, in other words, it is a fact that p, and (3) S is justified in
believing that p. For instance, you know that you are reading this chapter
because you experience reading this chapter. That experience, in turn,
justifies your belief that you are reading this chapter, and your belief is
also true: you are in fact reading this chapter. This traditional analysis

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has also been called the tripartite or the JTB-analysis, i.e., knowledge
amounts to Justified True Belief.
In the traditional analysis, the function of the justification condition
is to rule out epistemic luck, i.e., cases in which it’s only accidental, co-
incidental, or fortuitous that the belief of the epistemic subject happens
to be true. Consider, e.g., the fictional, lying president hinted at in the
introduction (any resemblance to actual presidents is of course purely
coincidental). Suppose that out of 1000 of his statements, 999 are lies
and only one is actually true. Suppose, furthermore, that an obstinate,
gullible adherent believes every claim the president is making, and so,
not only believes the 999 falsehoods, but also the president’s rare, true
claim. Doesn’t it seem counterintuitive to conceive of that accidentally
true belief as knowledge? According to the JTB analysis, it does, and the
reason is that the gullible adherent lacks proper justification.
However, is the mere justification condition enough to rule out all
conceivable cases of epistemic luck? In his famous three-page paper
“Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”, Gettier (1963) questions whether
the three conditions of the traditional analysis are jointly sufficient for
knowledge with two quite specific counterexamples. Here we’ll interpret
an earlier counterexample by Russell (1948) along the same lines: Russell’s
stopped clock. Suppose that a man looks at an analogue clock that has
in fact stopped, though he thinks it is working, and looks at it exactly
at the moment when it tells the correct time. All three conditions of the
traditional analysis of knowledge have been met: the man acquires a
justified true belief as to the time of day. However, it’s counterintuitive to
conceive of the man’s justified true belief as a genuine case of knowledge.
In other words, there are cases of epistemic luck that are not ruled out by
the justification condition as such.
Attempted solutions to this Gettier problem try to explain why sub-
jects in Gettier cases do not know that p, despite having a justified true
belief that p. Some add a fourth condition to the JTB-analysis, i.e., an
X-factor that marks the difference between genuine cases of knowledge
and Gettier cases. One attempted solution is the “no false lemmas anal-
ysis”: on top of justified true belief, knowledge requires that the belief
may not be inferred from any falsehood. The no false lemmas approach
solves Russell’s clock: the man doesn’t know the time of the day because,
while the clock has stopped, he erroneously assumes it is still going. An-
other attempted solution is the “no defeaters analysis”: on top of justified

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true belief, knowledge requires that there may not be any undermining
evidence unavailable to the epistemic subject. In the case of Russell’s
clock, there is such a defeater: if the man knows the clock has stopped,
he wouldn’t acquire his justified true belief as to the time of the day.
Another strategy to solve the Gettier problem seeks to replace the
justification condition. For instance, Goldman (1967) suggests that instead
of S having justification for her belief that p, the causal condition must be
met; i.e., the belief that p must be caused by the fact that p. Goldman’s
causal analysis solves Russell’s clock: although the man’s justified true
belief is caused by the time indicated by the clock, the indicated time is
not caused by the actual time of day, but by the fact that the clock has
stopped. Replacing the justification condition is also the strategy that
Dretske (1971), Goldman (1976), and Nozick (1981) adopt, proposing the
sensitivity condition instead, which requires that S would not believe that
p if p were false. Truth sensitivity solves Russell’s clock as well because if
the actual time of day differed from the time indicated by the clock, the
man would still believe the indicated time to be right.
Although all the alternative analyses mentioned above can successfully
deal with Gettier cases like Russell’s clock, none of them have proven
immune to counterexamples up until now. According to Williamson
(2000), this predicament results from attempting to add an objective
condition, i.e., the truth condition, to the analysis of knowledge, which is
rather entirely subjective. Another trend in epistemology pointing in a
similar subjectivist direction is standpoint epistemology. For example,
Sandra Harding (1991) draws our attention to the social group to which
the epistemic subject belongs, and whether that group is marginalized.

3 • skeptical alternatives

A second central problem in epistemology is whether knowledge is at-

tainable in the first place. Meeting the belief condition is not hard at
all, but meeting the truth condition may be impossible. Can you know
that it’s true that the external world and other minds exist? It’s conceiv-
able and thereby at least logically possible that you are the only mind
that really exists, and that other minds and the external world are merely
your confabulations. Can we really exclude such a skeptical alternative?
Can we know for sure that it doesn’t obtain? And if we cannot rule out
such skeptical alternatives, are there any basic things we can establish

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as certainties, like that we have hands or are reading this chapter? In

medieval times, skeptical arguments were offered to discuss the notions
of knowledge and certainty (Adriaenssen, 2013). But it is Descartes who
is credited with having defined the problem of skepticism with skeptical
alternatives. In his meditations, starting from the well-known experi-
ence of waking up from a dream and realizing it was all a dream and the
subsequent question of how we know that we are not dreaming the whole
time, Descartes asks us to take one step further and imagine that we are
systematically misled by an evil demon. Whereas the thought that we
might be dreaming threatens only the existence and our knowledge of the
external world, such an evil demon would undercut even something as
sure as mathematical knowledge. The logical possibility of the dream and
the evil demon constitutes skeptical alternatives, i.e., alternative explana-
tions of our experiences that endanger whatever we think we know. While
we need to rule them out, we can never do so completely. Recall, e.g., the
sensitivity condition: you cannot know that you are not systematically
misled by an evil demon because if you were, you would still believe that
there was no evil demon.
Let’s develop a similar but more recent example. Suppose that you
are the epistemic subject S and that the proposition p that you know is
that you have hands. Enters the skeptical alternative. It’s conceivable and
thereby at least logically possible that you are not a person of flesh and
bones, but rather a Brain In a Vat (or BIV) in which all the experiences
that you have are artificially produced by electric stimulation. Of course,
you do not really believe that you are a BIV, but you cannot exclude the
possibility either. So far so good; it’s possible that you know that you have
hands and that you do not know that you are not a BIV at the same time.
However, the skeptical challenge arises from the conditional assumption
that “if you know that you have hands, then you know that you are not a
BIV.” The underlying idea is that knowledge is factive: you can only know
that you have hands if it’s a fact or if it’s true that you have hands. In other
words, you can only know that you have hands if it’s true that you are not
a BIV, but rather a person of flesh and bones (and hands). So, if you really
know that you have hands, then it is implied that you know, or at least are
in a position to know, that you are not a BIV.
The argument of the skeptic is that being able to know that you are
not a BIV is required for you to know that you have hands, and since
you cannot know that you are not a BIV, you cannot know that you have

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hands either. According to the skeptic, this point generalizes: whoever the
epistemic subject S is, whatever the belief p is, and whatever the skeptical
alternative is, S cannot know that p because, to know that p, S should be
able to exclude all skeptical alternatives to p, but S cannot exclude any of
its skeptical alternatives.
In the face of the skeptic’s arguments, we can defend talk about knowl-
edge by drawing attention to the role and importance of context. Nor-
mally, we know that we have two hands, the earth is round, and 2+2 equals
4. However, when skeptical alternatives are made salient to us, we no
longer know those things. Before you started to read this Section 3, you
were not even aware of the possibility of your being a BIV, and so you knew
that you have hands in that context. However, by introducing in this section
the skeptical alternative that you might be a BIV, the context has changed.
Now, in this new context, the skeptical alternative that you might be a
BIV has become salient. Now you realize that you cannot exclude the
possibility of the skeptical alternative, and as a result, you no longer know
that you have hands in this context.
Kindly note that changing the context, making mere logical possibil-
ities salient to cast doubt, is exactly what the “merchants of doubt,” to
whom we alluded at the opening of this chapter, typically do to subvert
the call for political or legislative action. For instance, on behalf of to-
bacco companies, they argue that, despite appearances, it’s conceivable
and thereby possible that there is no relation between smoking and lung
cancer. Or they fabricate so-called scientific controversies to make the
logical possibility salient that, since the industrial revolution, there has
been no causal relation between human intervention and climate change
(Oreskes & Conway, 1981/2010).
We can also defend ourselves against the skeptic’s argument by ap-
pealing to context in a slightly different way. We justify our claims all
the time by adding reasons for these claims. To adopt a famous example
from Austin (1946), when someone claims that a bird is a goldfinch, she
might refer to its red head as typical of such a goldfinch. In response,
someone else may wonder whether the bird is not a woodpecker instead
of a goldfinch, pointing out that woodpeckers too have red heads. This is
what we call an appeal to a relevant alternative. In the context of a bird in
your garden, it makes sense to discuss whether it is a woodpecker or a
goldfinch, but it would be really strange if someone wondered whether it
was not a mechanical or stuffed bird, because such alternatives are not

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relevant in the context. So, to make a knowledge claim, an epistemic

subject should only be able to exclude all relevant alternatives, and which
alternatives are relevant is determined by the context. However, there are
hardly any contexts in which skeptical alternatives are relevant. As a result,
skeptical alternatives are hardly ever legitimately challenge knowledge
claims.

4 • agrippa's trilemma

We might think that we can defend ourselves against wholesale skepti-

cism and the conclusion that we really know nothing by arguing that the
alternatives articulated by the skeptics are just very unlikely, that we do
not have to take them seriously. There are several explanations for the
things we experience, and some are better than others. It is on the basis
of the quality of the explanations that we can discriminate between what
to believe or not. Pyrrhonian skeptics, though, like Pyrrho, Sextus Empir-
icus, and Montaigne, have argued that there is no independent, unbiased,
rational way to identify the best among competing criteria. Competing
explanations simply have their own pros and cons. It is impossible to
weigh these arguments properly, let alone settle for an independent, unbi-
ased, rational conclusion. So, basically, Pyrrhonian skeptics are skeptical
about the possibility of justification, and one of their main arguments to
that effect is known as Agrippa’s trilemma.
Beliefs can be justified by further beliefs. In Austin’s example, the
birdwatcher’s belief that the bird in the garden is a goldfinch is justified
by her belief that goldfinches have red heads and that the bird at issue
has the relevant characteristic. But what justifies these further beliefs?
Still further beliefs in a justification chain? This can’t go on ad infinitum,
can it? According to Agrippa’s trilemma, justification of beliefs by other
beliefs is impossible altogether because there are only three options, and
none of them is worth wanting: either

1. The justification chain terminates in basic beliefs that do not need

further justification because they are, in a sense, self-justifying, like
axioms in mathematics, or
2. The justification chain is circular, or
3. The justification chain does go on ad infinitum.

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9. the quest for truth

To avoid Pyrrhonian skepticism about justification, one might accept one

of the horns of the trilemma. The first option is to accept the axiomatic
horn. Throughout the history of ideas, by far most philosophers have
adopted this approach, which is called foundationalism: like a pyramid,
human knowledge in general and science in particular rest on a solid
foundation of absolutely certain, infallible, basic beliefs. Consider percep-
tual knowledge. Of course, we may err; our perceptual judgments may be
illusory or hallucinatory. However, we cannot be mistaken about having
the pure sensory experiences that we do have. Our interpretations may be
wrong, but we are infallible in having experienced what Descartes called
sensations, Locke ideas, Hume impressions, Mill phenomena, and Russell
sense-data. Beliefs that are ultimately justified by such basic beliefs are
safe and sound.
There are many objections to classical foundationalism, but the main
source of concern is the gap between, on the one hand, pure, uninter-
preted sensory experiences and, on the other hand, minimally interpreted
perceptual beliefs. Pure, uninterpreted sensory experiences may be in-
fallible, but they are inferentially sterile; because they are experiences,
and not yet propositional beliefs, nothing can be inferred from them,
and hence they cannot provide foundational justification. Looking at a
banana, I have a visual experience, which doesn’t justify anything as such.
Only when sensory experiences are minimally interpreted, i.e., if they are
turned into propositional beliefs, can they provide justification. So, my
visual experience may trigger me to form the belief that there is a curved
yellow object in front of me, which in turn may provide justification for a
further belief that the object in front in me is a banana. But the trouble
with minimally interpreted perceptual beliefs is that they are no longer
infallible – the object may in actual fact be pale green and straight – and
hence, they cannot be the basic beliefs that terminate the justification
regress either.
A second option is to accept the circular horn of Agrippa’s trilemma.
This results in the position we call “coherentism.” According to coheren-
tists, justification is holistic and not transferred from one belief to another.
Beliefs hang together in more or less coherent “webs of beliefs.” Whether
or not a particular belief is justified is determined by whether and to
what extent it fits or coheres with the other beliefs in the web of beliefs
of the epistemic subject. The minimal conception of coherence is logical
consistency, but most coherentists believe that explanatory connections

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contribute significantly to the overall coherence of beliefs and webs of

beliefs. Intuitively, four completely unrelated beliefs are less coherent
than, for instance, a doctor’s belief that a single diagnosis explains three
disparate symptoms; the diagnosis pulls the symptoms together.
There are many objections to coherentism as well, but the main source
of concern is the isolation problem: coherent webs of beliefs can become
completely detached from reality. Think, for instance, of conspiracy the-
ories; those often make up internally coherent wholes, in which beliefs
hook up neatly. However, from the “outside,” people see that such theories
are way off-base.
A third and final possibility is to accept the regressive horn of Agrippa’s
trilemma: the justification regress is not vicious, but virtuous. Beliefs
can be justified by an infinite chain of justification. In response to the
objection that the human mind is finite and limited, Klein (1999) argues
that the infinitist is not claiming that the epistemic subject actually needs
to have an infinite chain of reasons in mind. What is required is that it
must be possible in principle, but not in practice, to provide an infinite
chain of reasons. Moreover, Atkinson & Peijnenburg (2017) prove that
the longer a justification chain becomes, the more the returns of further
justification diminish, so that ultimately, no further justification is called
for.

5 • reliabilism

Up until now, we have considered the justification of beliefs by other be-

liefs. An underlying assumption has been that, at least in principle, the
epistemic subject has access to the justification of a belief: the founda-
tionalist can trace back or reduce her belief to a foundational layer of
basic beliefs ultimately supporting it, the coherentist is or can become
aware that her belief hangs together with other beliefs constituting a
coherent web of beliefs, and so on. What these approaches to justification
share is internalism: factors internal to the epistemic subject determine
whether her belief is justified. However, triggered by the Gettier problem
(see Section 2), philosophers have also developed externalist approaches
to justification. According to these approaches, only factors external to
the epistemic subject determine whether her belief is justified. Accord-
ing to externalism, then, the epistemic subject needs no access to the
justification of a belief.

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Reliabilism is such an externalist theory of justification. To grasp the

basic notion of reliability, we can think of the debate about the media
and “fake news.” Journals or networks that often publish news that turns
out to be false are unreliable. Readers, listeners, or viewers should not
rely on them, but rather base their beliefs on information obtained from
reliable outlets: journals and networks that almost never publish false
information. So, in this context, being reliable is a function of being truth-
conducive; the degree of reliability of the media depends on the ratio of
the true to false beliefs they tend to produce. Goldman (1979) argues that
what is true for networks and journals is also true of ourselves: some
of the ways in which we acquire beliefs are clearly less reliable than oth-
ers. Guesswork, hasty generalizations, and wishful thinking are clearly
unreliable because, more often than not, they produce false beliefs. In
contrast, belief-forming processes like standard perceptual processes and
good reasoning are reliable: they tend to produce more true than false
beliefs. Hence, reliabilism proposes that a belief is justified if and only if
it has been formed by a reliable process of belief-formation, and where
the reliability of the process is defined in terms of its tendency to form
beliefs that are true rather than false.
Unfortunately, reliabilism can be challenged by the Brain-In-a-Vat
version of the evil demon scenario discussed above. The reason for that is
that we need to be sure about the existence of the external world and our
(perceptual) relation to it before we can say anything about the reliability
of our perceptions. Suppose that in some scenario, your counterpart, i.e.,
your local representative in some possible world, has exactly the same
perceptual experiences as you have, and forms exactly the same percep-
tual beliefs as you do. However, there is one all- important difference:
in contrast to you, your counterpart is systematically misled by an evil
demon and is in actual fact a Brain In a Vat. As a result, almost all your
counterpart’s perceptual beliefs are false, and we must qualify the percep-
tual processes by which they are formed as highly unreliable. However,
the input is the same: you and your counterpart have the same perceptual
experiences. And the output is the same as well: you and your counter-
part form the same perceptual beliefs. So, if your perceptual beliefs are
justified, your counterpart’s perceptual beliefs should be justified as well.
There are several other problems with reliabilism that we will not
discuss here. However, one thing to note is that a major advantage of
reliabilism is that, unlike internalism, it allows for what Sosa calls animal

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knowledge. A significant part of human knowledge consists of first-order,

reliably produced true or apt belief. Your first-order true belief that you
are now reading this chapter is reliably formed based on perception (and
perhaps also a reliable bit of introspection). However, according to Sosa’s
own hybrid account, human knowledge is not restricted to animal knowl-
edge: you can upgrade your apt belief to what Sosa calls reflective knowl-
edge by reflecting on how your apt belief fits coherently with other beliefs
you have, like, for instance, your belief that you have bought this book in
that bookshop, your belief that you could hardly wait to start reading this
chapter, and so on.

6 • the context of inquiry

We started this chapter with a handful of pressing and complex real-world

problems, all related to the epistemic quest of finding out what is and
isn’t true. Subsequently, we discussed big questions in epistemology –
the analysis of knowledge, the possibility of knowledge, and the nature
of justification – and to that end, we made abundant use of imaginary
examples and counterexamples. At face value, we are now facing the ap-
plicability gap, i.e., the gap between, on the one hand, deep but narrow
academic puzzles, and, on the other hand, complex real-world problems.
Now, in what sense and in what way can philosophy in general, and episte-
mology in particular, help to bridge that applicability gap? What modest
role can philosophy and epistemology play in addressing and solving the
real-world problems of our time? The first key to reaping the harvest of
more than 25 centuries of philosophy, for the purpose of solving press-
ing real-world problems, is “context.” Philosophical questions often are
decontextualized questions, and that is why, ever since Plato, stipulated,
imaginary cases and scenarios are the ideal tools for philosophical inves-
tigations. The downside is that there never seem to be definite answers to
decontextualized questions. Philosophers prefer to put more and more
possible solutions on the table, and to go on and on with considering and
weighing their pros and cons. In a contextual approach, however, one
tries to enrich the definition of a problem by bringing in more details and
context in such a way that, at the end of day, a solution can be arrived at,
i.e., the best solution for the problem at hand in its context.
In addressing real-world problems, philosophical, conceptual ques-
tions often and easily pop up. For instance, to become clear about what

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one knows at some point in time, one needs a conception of knowledge.

Or to take another example, to assess to what extent a theory is justified,
one needs a conception of justification. As we can learn from Sections
1, 3, and 4, without context, the analysis of concepts like “knowledge” or
“justification” or still, for that matter, “coherence,” is an endless game.
There simply are no one-size-fits-all solutions to philosophical, concep-
tual problems because in different contexts, different conceptions are
appropriate. Only when we are clear about the context of the real- world
problem that we want to solve, our goals, and so on, can we start defining
a concept in a fruitful way. To that end, the exploration of possible con-
ceptions during 25 centuries of philosophy has not been in vain. On the
contrary, it allows the real-world problem-solvers to significantly speed
up defining the concept at hand for the purpose at hand.
From our discussion of skepticism about knowledge in Section 3 and
of skepticism about justification in Section 4, we can learn a second impor-
tant lesson in how epistemology could and should make itself more useful
in addressing and solving real-world problems. Epistemology should
reorientate itself and focus more on inquiry, how to obtain knowledge,
and how to find out what is and what isn’t true, than on analyzing end-
products. In the real world, epistemic subjects in general, and problem-
solvers in particular, are always in the midst of inquiry: some things they
can safely assume and act on, whereas other things they need to find out or
investigate further. In the midst of inquiry, there is little use for analyses
of idealized, unattainable goals. By contrast, a profound understanding
of the structure of inquiry, i.e., the structure of problem-solving itself,
would be most useful. For instance, it would suggest to problem-solvers
what the best next step is in solving the complex, real-world problem they
are addressing.
Let me illustrate this point by adopting an analogy from Schurz and
developing it a little bit. Suppose that someone in a hurry asks an episte-
mologist for the right way to the railway station. A traditional epistemol-
ogist will respond: “Among all possible ways that start where you are right
now and end at the railway station, find the shortest one and choose it.”
With that answer, the epistemologist does not risk anything. It is a true
answer, but also completely useless. It bounces back the question that the
person asking it is interested in, acting as if it is an answer. Epistemolo-
gists can do so much better, but not by providing substantive answers –
after all, it is their profession to think and reflect on what knowledge is,

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not provide answers to all possible questions people might have. What
they can do is provide what we can call a heuristic answer, i.e., an answer
that sheds light on how to find the answer to the substantive question.
The epistemologist can shed light on the quickest way to find that answer,
or point out that one should first get one’s goals clear, and so on.
These two lessons fit together nicely. As we discussed toward the end
of Section 3, “contexts” or problem-solving situations not only allow for
fruitful conceptions but also determine which alternatives are relevant.
In their turn, the relevant alternatives determine the further steps to be
taken and the further questions to be asked in the process of solving the
real-world problem. As a matter of principle, all voices in the marketplace
of ideas deserve to be heard, but the epistemologist can learn and teach
how to single out the most relevant ones, step by step.

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