Epistemology: The Study of Knowledge and Justified Belief

Hello World, My name is Jeremy Reddig and the purpose of this blog roll is to satisfy two things (1) our understanding of epistemology and (2) a means to improve my writing. Go ahead and leave comments below to help me, help you. Note: I will use examples from the book and from my own experience.

To be clear, I am taking notes from a book titled An Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology by Matthias Steup; if you need a copy to follow along click on the the title in this sentence and a link will direct you. The blog roll will consist of various post that are related to the book and will be in chronological order. Philosophy professors won't typically teach the book in order so this may or may not help students for this semester. However, next semester this will be a viable source for Epistemology students as it will aide in their studies.

Seeking answers to these two types of questions are engaging in the study of Epistemology.

Theoretical Questions:
Q1: What is knowledge?
A1: Concept of knowledge must be defined.

Q2: What do we know?
A2: Extent of knowledge must be determined.

Q3: What is it for a belief to be justified?
A3: Concept of justification must be analyzed.

Q4: Which of our beliefs are justified?
A4: We must determine the extent of what we are justified in believing.

Practical Question:
Q5: What should we believe?
A5: And I will leave you with this note to act as a future reference upon completion:

In order to answer this question, epistemologists must develop appropriate methodologies --- methodologies that, if followed, help their practitionaers to acquire justified beliefs, or even knowledge, and to avoid unjustified beliefs and error. Our focus in this book will be mostly theoretical. We shall discuss issues of practical epistemology only insofar as they bear on theoretical questions.
Many philosophers think there is a close conceptual connection between knowledge and justification. they hold that a belief cannot amount to knowledge unless it is justified. On that view, we cannot answer the two questions about knowledge without answering the two questions about justification. However, since the nature and extent of justified belief is an independently interesting issue, questions 3 and 4 would still remain central questions of epistemology even if these philosophers were wrong.
In this chapter, we will focus on the definition of knowledge and the role justification plays in that definition. In Chapter 2, we will consider precisely what we wish to accomplish when we attempt to analyze concepts such as knowledge and justification. In Chapters 3 through 8, we will consider various theories about the nature of justification. In Chapter 9, we will be concerned with issues of methodology, with how epistemology ought to be done. Finally, in Chapter 10, we will examine the extent of justified belief and knowledge and discuss skeptical and nonskeptical responses to questions 2 and 4. Steup, Matthias. An Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1996. 2. Print.