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Analysis of Nozick's Knowledge Argument

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In Nozick's article, he attempts to respond to the question of what is necessary to obtain knowledge or truly know something. Gettier presented this challenge when he claimed and defended the idea that justified true belief does not equate to knowledge because you can be correct and justified yet that "knowledge" can simply be a coincidence. Gettier failed to respond to what else was necessary to really know something which is what Nozick responds to. Nozick believes that there are two additional premises that need to be met in addition to the justified true belief premises in order to eliminate coincidental knowledge and agrees with Gettier that the two premises alone are not sufficient for knowledge. The first two insufficient premises being, that it's true, and you are justified in believing its true. Nozick then adds that if it's not true, you would believe it to not be true and if it were true, you would believe it to be true. Nozick's addition makes knowledge sensitive to the truth, "To know is to have the belief that tracks the truth, having a specific real factual connection to the world: tracking it" (Nozick, p. 349) The addition of the last two premises are there in order to eliminate coincidence and Nozick demonstrates this very clearly through examples. The subjunctive condition states that if it isn't true, one wouldn't believe it to be true, Nozick defends this premise with an example provided by Gettier that satisfies the justified true belief account of knowledge but not Nozicks'. The example goes as follows, "Two other people are in my office and I am justified on the basis of much evidence that the first one owns a Ford car; though he (now) does not, the second person (a stranger to me) does"  (Nozick, p. 348). According to the justified true belief account of knowledge, the office man truly does know someone in the office owns a Ford yet it is clear that his "knowledge" is just a coincidence. By adding the th

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