ABSTRACT
The philosophical study of human knowledge seeks to understand what human knowledge is and how it comes to be. It would be as absurd to cast doubt on the prospects of scientific investigation of human knowledge and perception as it would be to declare limits to our understanding of human digestion. If the philosophical investigation of knowledge is something distinctive, or sets itself certain special or unique goals, one might question whether those goals can really be reached without thereby casting any doubt on investigations of human knowledge which lack those distinctive philosophical features. Most philosophers deny, or at the very least resist, the force of reflections. “Externalism,” if it got the conditions of knowledge right, would work fine for other people’s knowledge. As a third-person, observational study of human beings and other animals, it would avoid the obstacles to human understanding apparently involved in the first-person Cartesian project.
