PHI4300 Introduction to Epistemology - Curriculum Guide

Course Description

PHI4300 is epistemology — the philosophical study of knowledge itself. The Statewide Course Numbering System titles it Introduction to Epistemology, marks it (U) for upper division, and describes it in six words: "a beginning course in theories of knowledge." There is no statewide prerequisite.

Three Florida public universities carry it, all at 3 credits: the University of South Florida as Theory of Knowledge, the University of Central Florida as Theories of Knowledge, and the University of West Florida as Skepticism, Knowledge, and Truth. ✅ No credit divergence, and all three titles name the same subject.

⚠⚠⚠ But one thing differs between them that is invisible from the title, the number and the credits, and it can cost a student an extra course: whether the course carries Florida's GORDON RULE writing designation. USF and UWF both do. UCF does not. Read *Special Information* before you use this course to fill a requirement.

⚠ What the course actually asks. Epistemology begins from a question that sounds trivial and is not: what is the difference between knowing something and merely believing something that happens to be true? The traditional answer — knowledge is justified true belief — survived for two thousand years and was demolished in three pages by Edmund Gettier in 1963. ⚠⚠ Much of the modern field is the attempt to repair it, and the course is largely the story of those attempts and why each one fails.

⚠ The second half of the subject is scepticism, and it is not a rhetorical exercise. The sceptical arguments — the dream argument, the brain in a vat, the problem of induction, the regress of justification — are genuinely hard, and no response commands consensus. ⚠⚠ UWF's title names exactly this structure: scepticism, knowledge, and truth. Students who expect philosophy to arrive at answers find this course frustrating; students who come to see that the arguments themselves are the content find it the most useful course they take — because the skill it builds is the evaluation of reasons, which transfers to everything.

Learning Outcomes

Required Outcomes

• Distinguish knowledge from true belief, justified belief and certainty, and state the traditional justified-true-belief analysis precisely.
• ⚠ Present and evaluate Gettier cases, and explain exactly which condition they show to be insufficient.
• Compare the major post-Gettier analyses — no-false-lemmas, causal, reliabilist, defeasibility, safety, sensitivity, virtue-theoretic — and identify counterexamples to each.
• Distinguish internalism from externalism about justification, and state the strongest case for each.
• Compare foundationalism, coherentism and infinitism as responses to the regress of justification.
• Distinguish a priori from a posteriori knowledge, and analytic from synthetic truths, and explain why the distinctions have been challenged.
• ⚠⚠ Reconstruct the major sceptical arguments in valid form — the dream argument, the evil demon, the brain in a vat, the problem of the criterion — and evaluate the leading responses.
• Explain the problem of induction and assess attempted solutions.
• Compare theories of truth — correspondence, coherence, pragmatist, deflationary — and relate each to the theory of knowledge.
• Analyse the sources of knowledge: perception, memory, introspection, reason, and testimony.
• ⚠ Analyse testimony and epistemic dependence — when it is rational to believe what you are told, and how much of what anyone knows rests on it.
• Reconstruct an argument from a primary text in standard form, identify its premises, and locate the point of disagreement.
• ⚠ Write a philosophical argument: advance a thesis, give reasons, state the strongest objection, and reply to it.
• Cite philosophical sources correctly and represent an opponent's position accurately and charitably.

Optional Outcomes

• Address social epistemology — group knowledge, disagreement, expertise, and the epistemology of testimony at scale.
• Address epistemic injustice (Fricker), testimonial and hermeneutical injustice.
• Address formal epistemology — Bayesian confirmation, credences, probabilistic coherence.
• Address naturalised epistemology (Quine) and the relation between epistemology and cognitive science.
• Address contextualism and the shifting standards of "knows".
• Address virtue epistemology and intellectual character.
• Address feminist epistemology and standpoint theory.
• Address the epistemology of science, religion or mathematics specifically.
• ⚠ Address misinformation, echo chambers and epistemic autonomy — increasingly common, and directly applied.

Major Topics

Required Topics

• What knowledge is — propositional, procedural and acquaintance knowledge; the JTB analysis.
• The Gettier problem and the post-Gettier literature.
• Justification — internalism and externalism, evidentialism, reliabilism, epistemic deontology.
• The regress problem — foundationalism, coherentism, infinitism.
• A priori knowledge — rationalism and empiricism, the analytic/synthetic distinction, Kant's synthetic a priori, Quine's attack.
• ⚠ Scepticism — Pyrrhonian and Cartesian, the dream and demon arguments, closure and its denial, Moore's response, transcendental arguments, contextualist responses.
• Induction — Hume's problem, the new riddle of induction, pragmatic and probabilistic responses.
• Truth — correspondence, coherence, pragmatist and deflationary theories.
• Perception — direct and indirect realism, the argument from illusion, the given.
• Memory and introspection as sources, and their reliability.
• Testimony — reductionism and anti-reductionism; ⚠ epistemic dependence on others.
• Philosophical method and writing — argument reconstruction, counterexample, thought experiment, charitable interpretation.

Optional Topics

• Social epistemology, disagreement and expertise.
• Epistemic injustice.
• Bayesian and formal epistemology.
• Naturalised epistemology and experimental philosophy.
• Contextualism and relativism about knowledge.
• Virtue epistemology.
• Feminist epistemology and standpoint theory.
• Philosophy of science, religion or mathematics as applied epistemology.
• Misinformation, trust and the epistemology of the internet.

Resources & Tools

• Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction by Robert Audi and Epistemology by Richard Feldman are the two most widely assigned textbooks. Contemporary Epistemology (Lemos) and Knowledge: A Very Short Introduction (Pritchard) are the shorter routes in.
• ⚠ Expect primary sources rather than a textbook alone. The set is fairly standard: Plato's Theaetetus and Meno; Descartes' Meditations (the first two, always); Hume's Enquiry on induction; Gettier's three-page 1963 paper; Goldman on reliabilism; Quine's "Two Dogmas"; Moore on the external world; and Gettier-response literature from Nozick, Dretske, Sosa and Zagzebski.
• ⚠⚠ Free, authoritative and better than any textbook for reference: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (plato.stanford.edu) — peer-reviewed, written by specialists, continuously updated, and free. ⚠ Its entries on "Epistemology", "The Analysis of Knowledge", "Skepticism" and "Epistemic Justification" are the single best study resource for this course. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a good second source.
• ⚠ Also free: most of the historical primary texts are public domain — Project Gutenberg and Early Modern Texts (earlymoderntexts.com — ⚠ modernised, readable versions of Descartes, Hume, Locke and Berkeley, free, and genuinely easier than the standard translations). PhilPapers for locating contemporary articles.
• JSTOR and Project MUSE through your library for journal articles; the Philosopher's Index is the discipline's own index.
• ⚠⚠ The most useful practical tool in this course is a technique rather than a resource: reconstruct every argument in standard form — numbered premises, then the conclusion — before you evaluate it. Most disagreement in philosophy turns out to be about one premise, and until the argument is written out you cannot say which. Instructors grade on this whether or not they say so.
• ⚠ Florida context: philosophy is a small discipline everywhere, but ⚠ Florida State has a substantial philosophy graduate programme and UF, USF, UCF and FIU all run undergraduate majors with active faculty. Ask about undergraduate philosophy conferences and journals — they exist, they accept undergraduate work, and a published or presented paper is a real advantage for graduate or law-school applications.

Career Pathways

• ⚠⚠ The honest framing, which philosophy departments are often too modest to make: this course builds a narrow, rare and unusually valuable skill — the ability to take an argument apart and say exactly where it fails. Almost nothing else in an undergraduate curriculum trains that directly.
• ⚠⚠⚠ Lawyer (SOC 23-1011) — philosophy majors have for decades posted among the highest LSAT scores of any undergraduate field, and epistemology is a large part of why. Legal reasoning is argument reconstruction, counterexample and burden of proof — the working content of this course. If law school is the goal, this is one of the best courses available to you anywhere in the catalog.
• Postsecondary Teacher (SOC 25-1126) — ⚠ requires a PhD, and the academic philosophy market is genuinely difficult; a student considering it should discuss the odds frankly with faculty.
• Technical Writer (SOC 27-3042), Editor (SOC 27-3041), Writer (SOC 27-3043) — ⚠ philosophy trains unusually precise prose, and precision is the scarce commodity in technical writing.
• Management Analyst (SOC 13-1111) and Operations Research Analyst (SOC 15-2031) — consulting and analysis hire for structured reasoning.
• ⚠⚠ AI ethics, policy and trust-and-safety roles — a real and growing category, and epistemology is directly relevant: questions about machine "knowledge", evidence, reliability and testimony are this course's questions applied to systems. ⚠ Related: Compliance Officer (SOC 13-1041) and policy analyst work.
• Secondary teaching (SOC 25-2031) with certification — ⚠ Florida does not generally certify philosophy as a secondary subject, so the route is usually social studies or English; check the FTCE subject areas before planning it.
• Medicine and bioethics — ⚠ medical schools accept philosophy majors readily and bioethics is a recognised specialisation; library and information science; intelligence analysis (SOC 19-3094), where evaluating source reliability is literally the job.
• ⚠ The realistic statement: philosophy is not a vocational degree and its graduates do well anyway, with earnings that compare favourably to most humanities fields by mid-career. What it requires is that you be able to say what the skill is — and this course's answer is: I can tell whether an argument works. Practise saying it.

Special Information

⚠⚠⚠ The Gordon Rule designation is NOT the same at all three institutions

Florida's Gordon Rule (State Board of Education Rule 6A-10.030) requires designated writing-intensive coursework and designated mathematics coursework for an associate or baccalaureate degree. ⚠⚠ A grade of C or higher is required for a Gordon Rule course to count — a C-minus does not satisfy it at most institutions, which is stricter than the ordinary passing standard and is a common and expensive trap.

⚠⚠⚠ The designation is made by the INSTITUTION, not by the course number — and the statewide records show the divergence directly on this number:

Institution	Its title	Gordon Rule writing?
University of South Florida	Theory of Knowledge	✅ yes
University of West Florida	Skepticism, Knowledge, and Truth	✅ yes
University of Central Florida	Theories of Knowledge	❌ no designation recorded

⚠ The designation makes obvious sense for this course — epistemology is taught by argumentative essay, and a writing-intensive designation is exactly right for it. Which makes UCF's absence the notable case rather than the other two.

The consequences are concrete:

• ⚠ A UCF student taking this course expecting to clear a Gordon Rule writing requirement has not cleared it, and will need another designated course.
• ⚠⚠ A USF or UWF student must earn a C or higher for it to count — which in a course graded largely on argumentative essays is a real condition, not a formality.
• ⚠⚠ Transferring is the worst case. Designation normally travels within the Florida public system, but a course that was not designated at the sending institution has nothing to carry, and a designated one may still be checked against the receiving institution's own list. Ask the receiving registrar in writing, before you register.

⚠⚠ The rule to take away, and it now has two worked examples in this catalog alongside `HIS2050`: never choose a course to satisfy a Gordon Rule requirement on the strength of its number. Check your own institution's designated list for the term you are enrolling in. It is a two-minute check.

Offering Notes — offerings and hours, school by school

Institution	Its title	Credits	Contact hours
University of South Florida	Theory of Knowledge	3	not published
University of Central Florida	Theories of Knowledge	3	not published
University of West Florida	Skepticism, Knowledge, and Truth	3	not published

Three State University System institutions. ✅ All three at 3 credits, and all three titles name the same subject — there is no subject divergence here, which is worth saying because so many numbers in this catalog have one.

⚠ The titles are informative about emphasis rather than about subject:

• "Theory of Knowledge" (USF) and "Theories of Knowledge" (UCF) are the standard English rendering of epistemology. ⚠ The singular/plural difference is not a signal — both are in common use for the same course.
• ⚠⚠ "Skepticism, Knowledge, and Truth" (UWF) names the three-part structure of a standard epistemology syllabus, and leading with scepticism suggests it is treated as the organising problem rather than as one topic among many. That is a defensible and arguably better design — the sceptical challenge is what makes the analysis of knowledge urgent — but it may mean less time on justification's internal debates.

⚠ The 45 contact hours at the top of this guide are derived — the Florida convention for a 3-credit lecture course. No institution publishes an hour figure. ⚠⚠ The scheduled hours describe this course poorly. The load is difficult reading — philosophical prose is slow by design, and a fifteen-page article can take two hours — plus essay writing, which dominates. Look at the number of essays on the syllabus, not the meeting pattern.

⚠ "Introduction to" at the 4000 level — what that actually means

The statewide title says Introduction to Epistemology and the number is 4000-level. ⚠ That combination is not a contradiction: it is an introduction to a SUBFIELD, offered to students who already have philosophical training — not an introduction to philosophy.

No statewide prerequisite is listed, but institutions normally expect upper-division standing and at least one prior philosophy course, and some restrict it to majors and minors. ⚠ Check, because a major restriction is invisible until registration fails.

⚠⚠ A practical recommendation: take an introduction to philosophy and, if possible, a logic course first. Logic is the higher-value preparation — this course reconstructs and evaluates arguments constantly, and a student who can already identify a valid form, spot an equivocation and construct a counterexample starts several weeks ahead. Florida numbers introductory logic in the `PHI` prefix and it is usually available every term.

Workload and the failure mode

Budget eight to ten hours a week, weighted toward reading and writing. ⚠ Expect a small number of essays carrying most of the grade, which makes the distribution lumpy and the cost of a bad week high.

⚠⚠⚠ The characteristic weak essay in philosophy is a summary, and this is worth stating precisely because students are rarely told. A paper that explains what Gettier argued, then what Goldman argued in response, then what Zagzebski argued in response to that, has reported a conversation rather than joined it.

⚠ What is wanted is narrower and harder: take a position and defend it. Advance a thesis, give your reason, state the strongest objection you can find to your own view — not the weakest — and reply to it. A short paper that does that on one small point outscores a long one that surveys five positions.

⚠⚠ And the specific discipline-norm worth learning early: charity. Represent the view you are attacking in its strongest form. Defeating a weak version of an opponent's argument is worth nothing in philosophy and is penalised, and the habit of stating the other side better than the other side stated it is the most transferable thing this course teaches — it is also, not coincidentally, what makes a good lawyer, negotiator and analyst.

⚠ Why this course is more applicable now than it was twenty years ago

⚠⚠ Worth naming, because students frequently assume epistemology is the least practical thing in a philosophy catalog and the opposite has become true. The course's core questions — when is it rational to believe what you are told; how do you assess a source's reliability; what does expertise entitle someone to; how does disagreement affect what you should believe — are the daily questions of an information environment saturated with confident claims.

⚠ The parts of the syllabus that carry this most directly are TESTIMONY and SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY, and they are frequently the optional topics. If your section offers them, they are the ones you will use. Almost everything any person knows — the shape of the Earth, the safety of a medicine, the existence of a country they have not visited — rests on testimony, and the question of when that is knowledge rather than lucky belief is not academic.

AI Integration

⚠⚠⚠ This is the course in the entire catalog with the most genuinely interesting relationship to these tools, and the reason is that epistemology's own questions apply to them directly. That deserves to come before the usual warnings.

The subject-matter point, which belongs on any current epistemology syllabus:

• ⚠⚠ Does a language model KNOW anything? It produces true propositions reliably in some domains. ⚠ On a reliabilist analysis that looks like a candidate for knowledge; on an internalist one it plainly is not, because there is no justification the system possesses. The question is a genuinely good examination question and it is not settled.
• ⚠⚠ Is accepting a model's output TESTIMONY? The epistemology of testimony asks when it is rational to believe what you are told, and the standard accounts appeal to the speaker's reliability, competence and accountability. A model has the first in some measure and lacks the third entirely — ⚠ which is a real gap, because accountability is doing more work in those accounts than is usually noticed.
• ⚠ Gettier cases are now easy to produce accidentally. A model states something true for no good reason and you believe it. You have a true, apparently justified belief that is not knowledge — the exact structure of the 1963 counterexample, arriving daily. That is a better illustration of Gettier than the ones in the textbooks.
• And the social-epistemology questions — epistemic dependence, the erosion of expertise, and whether widespread use makes a population's beliefs better or worse justified.

Genuinely useful as a study tool: explaining a difficult position a second and third way; helping reconstruct an argument in standard form so you can then evaluate it yourself; generating objections to a thesis you have written — ⚠ this is the best legitimate use in the course, because "what is the strongest objection to my view?" is exactly what the essay requires and what students are worst at; explaining an unfamiliar technical term; summarising a long article to decide whether to read it; and tightening prose in revision.

⚠⚠ Where it fails:

• ⚠⚠ It invents citations, papers, page numbers and positions — attributing views to philosophers who did not hold them, and quoting texts that do not contain the quotation. ⚠ And it is worse than usual here because philosophy attributions are fine-grained: the difference between what Goldman said in 1967 and in 1979 matters, and the tool blurs it. Use the Stanford Encyclopedia — free, peer-reviewed, and it cites properly.
• ⚠⚠⚠ It will not take a position, and taking a position IS the assignment. Models hedge toward balance and survey views. ⚠ That is precisely the characteristic weak essay this course penalises — so generated philosophical prose is not merely risky, it is a fluent example of the specific failure the grading criteria target. Reading it and asking "what would this paper have to do to earn a good mark?" is a genuinely instructive exercise.
• ⚠ It is uncharitable in a subtle way — it reproduces the textbook summary of a position, which is usually a simplified version. Philosophy requires the strongest form of the view, and the strongest form is in the primary text.
• It flattens style, and in a discipline where precision of expression is precision of thought, that matters more than it does elsewhere.
• ⚠ And the deepest problem, worth stating plainly: using it to produce philosophical writing defeats the only thing the course is for. You are not being trained to have views about knowledge; you are being trained to reason. The essay is the exercise, not the deliverable.

Academic integrity: read your syllabus, and expect a philosophy department's policy to be explicit — ⚠ many now require an AI-use statement, and some set in-class writing or oral defence precisely because the written essay is no longer self-authenticating. ⚠⚠ Where a Gordon Rule writing designation attaches to the course, the writing is the designated content, which makes the question a requirements question as well as an integrity one.