Contemporary Epistemology and the Tension Between Circularity and Incompleteness

As I prepare to study epistemology at the University of Edinburgh in January, I am reminded of the circular nature of contemporary epistemology. Epistemologists seek to define the term "knowledge" to understand precisely what humans can know and when they can know it. Traditionally, philosophers defined "knowledge" as "justified true belief." This definition held until the 20th Century when Edmund Gettier published a paper that called this definition into question. See "Is Justified True Belief Knoweldge," available at http://fitelson.org/proseminar/gettier.pdf.

Since that time, epistemologists have provided ever more sophisticated definitions of "knowledge." With each definition, however, a conscientious philosopher must ask "how do you know that this definition of knowledge is correct? Is it on the basis of the very conditions set forth in the definition (in which case your argument is circular) or is it on the basis of some other conditions that give rise to your knowledge? If the latter, your current definition of knowledge, whose accuracy you know on the basis of some other conditions for knowledge, does not actually define all instances of human knowledge as it purports." And for any putative definition of knowledge, the philosopher can repeat this identical line of questioning to show that any definition of knowledge is either circular or incomplete. This, it seems, leads inexorably to skepticism.

In the end, the philosophical landscape may not be this bleak. There are plenty of cogent responses to my line of reasoning above. However, I think it worth mentioning that all epistemology must confront this foundational tension between circularity and incompleteness. As Plato's Meno aptly argues (in what philosophers subsequently label the paradox of knowledge): "And how are you going to search for [the nature of virtue] when you don't know at all what it is, Socrates? Which of all the things you don't know will you set up as the target for your search? And even if you actually come across it, how will you know that it is that thing which you don't know?" (Meno 80d).