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Students Zone / Questions / Chapter 5: Knowledge

1. Describe the main features of Plato’s distinction between knowledge and opinion. Can his account of this distinction be upheld?

2. What are the essential differences between causal and purposive explanations? Do they both just reduce the unfamiliar to the familiar?

3. Is Roger Scruton right when he argues, ‘if it is ever true that someone knows anything, it does not follow that he also knows that he knows.’?

4. Why is it odd to say that you know something, but you don’t believe it?

5. What does it mean to say that truth is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition of knowledge?

6. ‘A belief is true when it depicts things as they are; when its account of the world is accurate.’ Discuss the implications of this and the problem of how we are to know when we have portrayed the world accurately.

7. Explain the claim that for a true belief to be knowledge we must justify it by giving reasons that convince others. What particular problems are raised in deciding what are or are not convincing reasons?