Fred Dretske

(1932 - 2013)

There are two ways to think about knowledge: From the bottom-up point of view, knowledge is an early arrival on the evolutionary scene; it is what animals need in order to coordinate their behavior with the environmental conditions. The top-down approach, departing from Descartes, considers knowledge constituted by a justified belief which gains its justification only in so far as the process by means of which it is reached conforms to canons of sciemific inference and rational theory choice. Keith Lehrer's epistemology is analyzed as a top-down intemahst position and criticised with examples that show that in certain cases obviously knowledge is attained without meeting the standards for reliability of sources and processing of the required informantion.