Close to the Truth
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Close to the Truth Peter Baumann 1 Received: 28 August 2019 / Revised: 11 December 2019 / Accepted: 3 March 2020 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract We often think or say that someone was wrong about something but almost right about it or close to the truth. This can mean more than one thing. Here, I propose an analysis of the idea of being epistemically close to the truth. This idea plays an important role in our practice of epistemic evaluation and therefore deserves some detailed attention. I start (section1) with an exposition of the idea of getting things right by looking at the main forms of reliabilism about true belief and belief acquisition. The focus on reliabilism is justified because (almost) everyone is a reliabilist in a basic sense. Section 2 develops a notion of closeness to the truth in two steps. Section 3 mentions some ways in which this notion is useful, one having to do with the Gettier problem. Keywords Knowledge . True belief . Closeness . Reliabilism . Gettier
We often think or say that someone was wrong about something but almost right about it or close to the truth. This can mean more than one thing.1 Here, I will propose an analysis of the idea of being epistemically close to the truth.2 This idea plays an important role in our practice of epistemic evaluation and therefore deserves some detailed attention. I will start (section 1) with an exposition of the idea of getting things right by looking at the main forms of reliabilism about true belief and belief acquisition. This is a necessary preparation for the 1
For related issues see, e.g., Sorensen 2016.
2
I will thus not go much at all into the topic of truthlikeness (see, e.g., Oddie 2016). This notion can be explained or construed in several different ways the details of which need not concern us here. But one can give some ostensive definitions or examples. For instance, an utterance of “It is 3 pm now” when it is only 2:59:32 pm at the moment of utterance is closer to the truth than an utterance of “It is 1:30 pm now”. Or, if Newton’s theory is not strictly true, it is (so it seems) much closer to the truth about laws of motion than Aristotle’s views on the subject. Truthlikeness is thus a semantic notion having to do with “closeness” or similarity between contents; it is not an epistemic notion concerning our relation to such contents. It is important to keep these different meanings of “close to the truth” apart.
* Peter Baumann [email protected]
1
Department of Philosophy, Swarthmore College, 500 College Avenue, Swarthmore, PA 19081, USA
Philosophia
next steps. The focus on reliabilism is justified because (almost) everyone is a reliabilist in a basic sense (see Baumann 2016, 34–36). Section 2 develops a notion of closeness to the truth in two steps. Section 3 mentions some ways in which this notion is useful.
1 Getting Things Right According to a currently much supported view about knowledge, the safety view (see, e.g., Sosa 1999), a safe true belief that p amounts to knowledge that p.3 Here is a basic explana
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