Thinking with Assent: Renewing a Traditional Account of Knowledge and Belief

Epistemology is currently in ferment. Ever since Plato, the textbook story goes, knowledge has been conceived as justified true belief; but in 1963 Edmund Gettier blew a huge hole in this supposedly traditional account. Six decades later, however, ongoing attempts to identify the conditions which turn belief into knowledge continue to face counterexamples and charges of circularity. In response to this recurrent failure, leading philosophers have begun exploring alternative accounts of knowledge.

This ground-breaking book pushes the revolt against post-Gettier epistemology in a radically new direction. It begins by challenging the crude history of philosophy underling the entire Gettier paradigm. A survey ranging from the pre-Socratics to the mid-twentieth century reveals that the allegedly ’standard’ or ’traditional’ analysis of knowledge is neither standard nor traditional. In fact, it is difficult to find major philosophers for thousands of years who regarded knowledge as a species of belief, or belief as entailed by knowledge. The standard view was rather that knowing and believing are distinct, mutually exclusive mental states, involving different mental faculties, and playing distinct and complementary roles in our cognitive lives.

Having demolished the historical premise upon which the entire Gettier paradigm rests, this book reframes elements of this age-old consensus in contemporary terms which push ’knowledge first’ epistemology in a fresh direction. Knowledge, Antognazza argues, is phenomenologically and ontologically prior to belief, and, crucially, is not a kind of belief - not even ＂the best kind＂. In turn, ＂mere believing＂ is not ＂a kind of botched knowing＂ but a mental state fundamentally different from knowing, with its own crucial and distinctive role in our cognitive life. Contrary to the claim that belief aims at knowledge, the specific contribution of belief to our cognition is that of aiming at truth when knowledge is out of our cognitive reach. Knowing and believing are mutually exclusive but complementary ways of ’thinking with assent’.

The book then applies this renewed paradigm to range of controversial issues, including the taxonomy of belief, the role of the will in belief, testimony, collective knowledge, and religious epistemology. Applying innovative methods to a vast range of materials on a rich variety of topics, this is a rare philosopher and a work of exceptional interest.

Maria Rosa Antognazza

At her premature death in March 2023, Maria Rosa Antognazza was Professor of Philosophy at King’s College London, member of the Academia Europaea, Trustee of The Royal Institute of Philosophy, Chair of the British Society for the History of Philosophy, and recently President of the British Society for the Philosophy of Religion. Educated at the Catholic University of Milan, she held fellowships and visiting professorships in Italy, Germany, Israel, Scotland, England, Switzerland, and the USA. Renowned for her prize-winning intellectual biography of Leibniz, she was also a prominent exponent of the value to philosophy of the study of its history.