The literature on knowledge (epistemology in the narrow sense) is among the most technical and most active in contemporary analytic philosophy. The framework sorts the literature by three irreducible forms formally distinguished at [§8.3.2](<8.3.2 What is Required.md>) — propositional (knowing-that), procedural (knowing-how), and acquaintance (knowing what it is like from inside) — and engages the principal positions by name; each is taken up again at [§8.3.5](<8.3.5 What is Concluded.md>) once the structural account is in view.

*The justified-true-belief analysis and Gettier.* From Plato (*Theaetetus* 201d) forward, the standard analysis of knowledge as justified true belief organized epistemology until Gettier (1963) produced counterexamples: cases where a subject has a justified true belief that intuitively does not count as knowledge. The post-Gettier literature splits into several programs: adding a fourth condition (Lehrer and Paxson 1969; Klein 1971), replacing justification with reliability (Goldman 1967, 1979), restructuring as safety or sensitivity (Sosa 1999; Williamson 2000; Pritchard 2005), or declining the analytic project altogether (Williamson 2000; Zagzebski 1994). The framework's reading is that Gettier-vulnerability is specifically a feature of the propositional form of knowledge, belief-shaped attempts to track structure, not of knowledge as such. This is shown in detail at [§8.3.4](<8.3.4 What is Confirmed.md>).

*Reliabilism and process epistemology.* Goldman (1967, 1979, 1986) developed an account on which knowledge is true belief produced by a reliable process. The position has been refined into proper-functionalism (Plantinga 1993), virtue reliabilism (Sosa 2007, 2015), and contemporary process-tracking accounts. The framework's reading is that reliabilism correctly identifies that the *holding* of the propositional form requires a relation to the world that goes beyond the propositional content itself, while supplying the deeper claim: what knowledge holds in the strong sense *is* the structure of what is the case, so reliable tracking is the activity by which the held grasp answers to the structure.

*Virtue epistemology.* Sosa (2007, 2015), Zagzebski (1996), and Greco (2010) developed accounts on which knowledge is true belief produced by intellectual virtues: stable cognitive dispositions that systematically track truth. The accounts shift the locus of evaluation from the belief to the knower. The framework reads virtue epistemology as picking up the being-and-its-tracking-capacity structure of knowledge, while extending the analysis to procedural and acquaintance forms the virtue-theoretic apparatus accommodates with strain.

*Williamson and knowledge-first epistemology.* Williamson (2000) argued that knowledge is conceptually prior to belief and to justification, not the other way around. Knowing P is not believing P plus other conditions but a basic mental state in its own right. The framework reads Williamson as correctly identifying that the standard analysis has the priority backwards, while supplying its own answer to what knowledge is more fundamentally: held grasp of structure (a standing cognitive hold on how things are, prior to and not reducible to any propositional formulation of it), with belief and justification as the propositional-form-specific shapes that grasp takes when articulated in propositions.

*Contextualism and pragmatic encroachment.* DeRose (1995), Lewis (1996), and Cohen (1999) developed contextualist accounts on which the truth-conditions of knowledge attributions depend on contextual features of the attributor's situation. Stanley (2005) and Hawthorne (2004) developed pragmatic-encroachment accounts on which the practical stakes affect whether the subject knows. The framework treats these as descriptions of the propositional form's behavior under varying conditions; the strong-sense knowledge the framework analyzes is not contextually variable, but the ordinary practice of attributing knowledge that ordinary speakers run is.

*Knowing-how and the propositional vs procedural debate.* Ryle (1949) distinguished knowing-how from knowing-that and argued they are structurally different. Stanley and Williamson (2001) argued that knowing-how reduces to a species of knowing-that. The dispute continues (Bengson and Moffett 2011; Stanley 2011). The framework holds that the propositional and procedural forms are distinct genuine forms of knowledge, neither reducible to the other, with each tracking structure in a different mode.

*Acquaintance.* Russell (1910–11) distinguished knowledge by acquaintance from knowledge by description; the tradition has been continued in different forms (BonJour 2003; Conee 1994; Tye 2009 for phenomenal acquaintance). Disputes are live about whether acquaintance is a genuine knowledge category or reduces to propositional knowledge of phenomenal facts. The framework treats acquaintance (the form in which a body holds a reconstructed representation of what it has encountered, rather than a proposition about it) as a third irreducible form, with the first-person perspective of [§8.1](<8.1 Drive.md>) supplying the substrate the reconstruction draws on.

*Consciousness and the conceivability challenge.* A distinct dispute concerns whether the acquaintance form resists any structural-functional account. Nagel (1974) argued that the subjective character of experience escapes objective description; Jackson's (1982) knowledge argument held that Mary, who knows every physical fact about color vision, learns something new on first seeing red; and Chalmers (1996, 2002) built the conceivability of zombies into an argument that consciousness is not entailed by functional organization, with the structure-and-dynamics objection holding that physical description delivers only structure and dynamics and so omits the qualitative. The framework's reading is that the acquaintance form is structural, a body's reconstructed representation of what it has encountered, not a non-structural remainder, and that the conceivability intuition reports a body's field-coverage of the modal structure (how much of it a body's acquaintance actually reaches, formally specified at [§8.3.5](<8.3.5 What is Concluded.md>)) rather than the structure itself. The engagement is run at [§8.3.5](<8.3.5 What is Concluded.md>).

*Animal knowledge.* A live literature investigates which non-human species count as knowing, what their knowledge consists in, and how to evaluate it (Sosa 2007 on "animal" vs "reflective" knowledge; Carruthers 2008). Honeybee spatial knowledge, corvid cache memory, primate planning, and cephalopod problem-solving have all been studied as candidates. The framework's depth-gradient reading supplies a usable framework: each form of knowledge runs at its own depth, with procedural knowledge widespread, propositional knowledge requiring the recursive depth at which the recursion can hold a belief-shaped structure, and acquaintance obtaining wherever a vantage opens at all.

*Skepticism.* From Pyrrho through Descartes through contemporary skeptical scenarios (brain in a vat, simulation arguments), skepticism organizes a substantial epistemological literature. Responses include reliabilism, virtue epistemology, contextualism, Moorean responses, and abductive responses to skeptical hypotheses. The framework's reading is that knowledge in the strong sense holds where the grasp fits the structure; skeptical scenarios construct conditions under which the fit would systematically fail, but the constructed conditions do not actually obtain, and the structural account does not require certainty against constructed scenarios to support knowledge in the ordinary case.

The literature on knowledge divides over the post-Gettier analytic program, reliabilism, virtue epistemology, knowledge-first, contextualism, the knowing-how debate, acquaintance, the conceivability challenge, animal knowledge, and skepticism. The framework commits to specific answers on each; they are taken up again at [§8.3.5](<8.3.5 What is Concluded.md>) after the structural account is in view.


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← [8.3 Knowledge](<8.3 Knowledge.md>) | [8.3.2 What is Required](<8.3.2 What is Required.md>) →
