William Bennett Munro Memorial Seminar

Is there more to knowledge than justified true belief (JTB)?  Many philosophers have used intuitive examples to try to show that there is, examples involving fake barns, or clocks that happen to be stopped at the right time.  But other methods can also be used to make this point. Recently, Timothy Williamson has been using the resources of epistemic logic to develop more abstract models of justified true belief that falls short of knowledge.  These models incorporate some interesting assumptions about our grasp of the relationship between appearance and reality. This talk examines these assumptions and identifies the features of our psychology most relevant to their plausibility.  I argue that by adapting Williamson's models to make them more psychologically realistic, we can see why the classical JTB theory had longstanding appeal, while also gaining a better understanding of what is wrong with it.