Student Material
Chapter 8: Truth, knowledge and belief
Students’ material: solutions
A
1 true; 2 false; 3 false; 4 false; 5 false; 6 true; 7 true; 8 true; 9 true; 10 true
B
1 implicitly speaker relative; 2 implicitly
speaker relative; 3 neither; 4 implicitly speaker relative; 5 neither;
6 indexical; 7 indexical; 8 neither; 9 indexical; 10 implicitly speaker
relative
C
1 a) no; b) no; c) no
2 a) yes; b) no; c) yes; d) yes
3 a) yes; b) yes*; c) unsure**
Notes
* It would not be wrong to answer ‘no’
here, if you think that Jock’s belief that ‘a woman will win the seat’
is different depending on which woman the proposition refers to – that
is, if you think it is a belief about a different woman.
** The case is deliberately set up to make us unsure about whether or
not Jock counts as knowing here. All of the elements of the tripartite
account of knowledge are in place: Jock has a true belief and he is
justified in holding that belief, but we may not feel that he counts as
knowing that a woman will win the seat, because his true belief seems
to track the wrong fact – it tracks a fact about Marjory, rather than a
fact about Yvonne. Such cases are known as Gettier Cases, after the
American philosopher Edmund Gettier introduced them in a 1963 article
called ‘Is justified true belief knowledge’, in which he challenged the
classic, tripartite account of knowledge.