Chapter 21 Further Reading: How Do I Know What's True?

Primary Texts

René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (1641) Start with Meditation I (the method of doubt and the evil demon) and Meditation II (the cogito). These two meditations — just twenty or thirty pages — are among the most influential and accessible texts in the history of philosophy. You don't need to follow Descartes's subsequent reconstruction to find enormous value in the skeptical challenge he poses and the precision of his thinking. Many modern editions include helpful introductions and notes. The Hackett edition, translated by Donald Cress, is reliable and inexpensive.

David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) More accessible than the earlier Treatise of Human Nature, the Enquiry presents Hume's empiricism and skepticism in polished essay form. Section II (on the origin of ideas), Section IV (on skeptical doubts about the operations of the understanding — his most famous section, on causation and induction), and Section XII (on the academic or sceptical philosophy) are the essential readings. The closing line of Section XII — about committing metaphysics to the flames — is one of the most memorable in the history of philosophy.

William James, "What Pragmatism Means" (1907) This is the second lecture from James's 1907 book Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking, and it is the single best short introduction to the pragmatist movement. James writes with unusual clarity and energy for a philosopher. The essay is approximately forty pages and is freely available through Project Gutenberg. Reading it alongside his lecture "The Will to Believe" (also free online) gives a fuller picture of James's radical empiricism.

Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2007), Chapters 1–2 Chapter 1 introduces testimonial injustice with the example of Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird and develops the concept with careful analytical precision. Chapter 2 extends the analysis. These two chapters (approximately sixty pages) are among the most important contributions to epistemology in the past twenty years and are entirely accessible to a non-specialist reader. The concept of epistemic injustice has since been applied across medicine, law, education, and political philosophy.

Secondary and Contextual Texts

Plato, Theaetetus This dialogue is the origin of the JTB account. Socrates, Theaetetus, and Theodorus work through what knowledge might be — is it perception? True belief? True belief with an account? — and find that every definition runs into difficulties. Reading the Theaetetus alongside the Gettier problem is illuminating: Plato saw many of the same difficulties that Gettier formalized 2,400 years later. The Hackett edition, translated by M.J. Levett and revised by Myles Burnyeat, is the standard choice.

Lorraine Code, What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge (1991) Code's book is a foundational text in feminist epistemology, arguing that "S knows that p" ignores the question of who S is — that the identity and social position of the knower are epistemically relevant. Chapter 1 ("Is the Sex of the Knower Epistemically Significant?") is the essential starting point. Code's arguments about the social dimensions of knowledge complement and extend Fricker's more targeted analysis of epistemic injustice.

Edmund Gettier, "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" (1963) The original paper is three pages long and can be found easily online. Reading it is an unusual philosophical experience: it is one of the most influential papers in twentieth-century philosophy, and it is entirely accessible to a first-time reader. After working through the chapter's discussion of Gettier cases, reading the paper itself reinforces how much philosophical upheaval three pages can produce.

Accessible Books for General Readers

Michael P. Lynch, The Internet of Us: Knowing More and Understanding Less in the Age of Big Data (2016) Lynch is a professional epistemologist who writes with unusual clarity for a general audience. The Internet of Us applies classical epistemological questions to the contemporary information environment: what does it mean to know something when you can Google anything? How does delegating cognitive tasks to digital networks change our epistemic situation? What are the collective epistemic consequences of social media and algorithmic information filtering? Lynch draws directly on pragmatism, virtue epistemology, and democratic theory to analyze our current epistemic crisis.

Kathryn Schulz, Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error (2010) Schulz — a journalist with a philosophical sensibility — asks what our relationship to error tells us about how knowledge and belief actually work. The book is intellectually wide-ranging (covering cognitive science, history, literature, and philosophy), engagingly written, and genuinely illuminating about the experience of being wrong: why it's harder than it should be to recognize, what it feels like when it happens, and what it means for how we should hold our beliefs. Highly recommended as a companion to the more theoretical discussions in this chapter.

A Note on Starting Points

If you are new to epistemology and want a single point of entry, start with William James's "What Pragmatism Means" — it is short, energetic, and immediately applicable to everyday life. If you want to engage with the hard philosophical core, start with Descartes' Meditation I and Hume's Enquiry Section IV — they will give you the skeptical challenge that all subsequent epistemology is responding to. If you want the most directly practical application, start with Lynch's The Internet of Us, which brings these questions into the contemporary information environment.