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Why

 

Philosophy with

Psychology

welcome

why?

Why are you studying philosophy with psychology? What do you want to achieve and how will you get it?
I know I'm supposed to tell you about course structure and things, but you want to think about this with your own personal aims in mind.
Also the course structure is extremely simple. So let’s start with the more interesting question of why you are here.
As background, let me tell you a bit about why someone might be doing philosophy with psychology.

1.

Here’s one idea

"The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket."

(Gettier, 1963)

Can be true, I can believe it, and that belief can be justified, and yet it can fail to be knowledge.

‘as Edmund Gettier showed ... there are cases of [justified true belief] that are not cases of knowledge. [Justified true belief], therefore, is not sufficient for knowledge’

(Steup & Neta, 2025)

This is the stanford encyclopedia

Starmans & Friedman (2012, p. figure 1 (part))

‘the lay concept of knowledge is roughly consistent with the traditional description of knowledge as justified true belief’

Starmans & Friedman (2012)

‘our fundamental conception of what it is to know that P is itself an explanatory conception ... we think of S's knowledge that P as something that can properly be explained by reference to what S has perceived or remembered or proved or ...’

(Cassam, 2007, p. 356).

A lot of philosophy is, or seems to be, about how ordinary people think.

In thinking about the mental
what, if anything, unites people across cultures?

‘which capacities travelled together? For example, when someone indicated that a beetle, a ghost or any other entity was capable of love, did they also tend to say it was capable of hunger, smell, guilt or memory?’

(Weisman et al., 2021, p. 1359)

distinctive = has value distinct from true belief
2^6 = 64 combinations of answers, each of which corresponds to a coherent philosophical theory of knowledge.
KNOWLEDGEyesno
Is it a mental state?Williamson (2000)Hyman (1999)
Knowing entails believing?Rose & Schaffer (2013)Radford (1966)
Is it a form of belief?Sosa (2007)Williamson (2000)
Valuable for action?Plato’s MenoKaplan (1985)
Is humanly attainable?[lots]Unger (1975)
Depends on context?Lewis (1996)[lots]
How are you going to decide between these theories? Let’s think about the kinds of method you can use if you are just a philosopher

philosophical
methods

informal observation,

guesswork (‘intuition’),

reasoning,

& theoretical elegance

First, think about the methods philosophers use. Am I missing any?
Next, think about how philosophers construct theories of knowledge ...

What anchors the notion of knowledge?

How do I distinguish a case where philosophers are offering conflicting theories of one thing rather than compatible theories of different things?

philosophers’ claims about knowledge as ...

descriptions of how all humans think?

norms concerning how all humans should think?

analyses of what scientific theories tacitly assume?

descriptions of how some humans could think?

...

why?

1.

Will offer more discussion about this later but let’s go to the administrative bits first.
Doesn’t really matter why I am here. Question is why you are here. Because all the practical decisions you make about your options and how you approach studying should flow from what your aims are in studying Philosophy with Psychology.
In thinking about knowledge, what can we gain by combining philosophy with psychology that neither discipline alone could provide?