ABSTRACT

Resting content with something less than a full-blooded conceptual analysis has the advantage that people steer free of a difficulty Johnston has articulated concerning the very idea of response-dispositionality, viz., and his so-called missing explanation argument. The objective is to develop a dispositional theory of knowledge. A theory which builds on the intuition underlying Nozick's tracking conception of knowledge: that knowledge demands skills to get things right, not merely in the actual world, but also in a relevant range of hypothetical situations. Given that Conditional Analysis offers the correct interpretation of dispositionality, the Nozickian tracking conditionals are the natural way to express precisely what such an epistemic dispositionality amounts to. Altering occurs when triggering of some disposition of an object causes the object to lose the disposition in question. Both internal and external mimicking, masking and altering of epistemic response-dispositions will, obviously, issue in counterexamples to tracking theories.