Knowledge ─ A Very Short Introduction

What is knowledge? Is it the same as opinion or truth? Do you need to be able to justify a claim in order to count as knowing it? How can we know that the outer world is real and not a dream?

Questions like these have existed since ancient times, and the branch of philosophy dedicated to answering them - epistemology - has been active for thousands of years. In this thought-provoking Very Short Introduction, Jennifer Nagel considers the central problems and paradoxes in the theory of knowledge and draws attention to the ways in which philosophers and theorists have responded to them. By exploring the relationship between knowledge and truth, and considering the problem of scepticism, Nagel introduces a series of influential historical and contemporary theories of knowledge, incorporating methods from logic, linguistics, and psychology, using a number of everyday examples to demonstrate the key issues and debates.

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Jennifer Nagel is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Associate Chair at the University of Toronto. Her research covers both historical and contemporary topics in epistemology. She has published on scepticism and empirical knowledge in Descartes and Locke and has also written a series of articles on intuitive ascriptions of knowledge.