Epistemology
What to master
Epistemology concerns knowledge, justification, and belief. Know the standard tripartite analysis (justified true belief) and the Gettier problem, which shows that justified true belief can fall short of knowledge. Understand the main responses: adding a no-false-lemmas condition, reliabilism, virtue epistemology, and safety or sensitivity conditions. Distinguish foundationalism, coherentism, and infinitism about the structure of justification, and internalism from externalism about what justifies. Cover sources of knowledge: perception and the problem of scepticism, testimony, memory, and reason. Address sceptical arguments, including Cartesian doubt and the brain-in-a-vat scenario, and the responses of Moorean common sense, contextualism, and fallibilism. Include a priori versus a posteriori knowledge and the analytic-synthetic distinction.
Traps to expect
Do not equate justification with truth, or certainty with knowledge. Gettier cases are not counterexamples to the JTB analysis as such but to the sufficiency of JTB. Reliabilism is externalist, so it does not require the knower to access the justifying process. Contextualism shifts standards of 'knows' with conversational context, not the facts.
Worked example
A stopped clock reads the correct time twice a day. If you glance and form a true, justified-seeming belief, you lack knowledge because the belief is not safely formed. Rule of thumb: test a proposed analysis by asking whether it excludes lucky true belief.