¹ Meno 97d–98a, in Dialogues of Plato (vol 1), translated by Benjamin Jowett, (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1875).

² Ibid., 98a.

³ However, in Republic V–VII, Plato depicts Socrates as rejecting the notion that knowledge could be understood in terms of belief, for knowledge and belief have different objects: Forms (and necessary truths) in the case of knowledge, and (illusory) physical objects and imitations of them in the case of belief.

⁴ Factive or factual knowledge (knowing that p is true where p is some proposition) can be distinguished from objectual knowledge (knowing o where o is some thing or being), and procedural knowledge (knowing how to A where A is some activity).

⁵ However, those of a Williamsonian bent, who take factive knowledge to be unanalysable in terms of belief, will reject the first but not the second of these presuppositions. See Timothy Williamson's contemporary classic Knowledge and its Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). For the purposes of this paper I must presuppose, rather than argue for, the analysability of factive knowledge in terms of belief. For critical discussion of the unanalysability thesis, see (among others) Aidan McGlynn, Knowledge First? (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).

⁶ Readers who reject the idea that beliefs about the future have truth-values may restrict the following discussion to contingent beliefs about the present.

⁷ Or to put it more precisely: reliable doxastic processes functioning reliably (a doxastic process that is generally reliable may be unreliable over a range of inputs and circumstances).

⁸ What has come to be known as safety and sensitivity can be seen as ways of characterizing alethic security. As Ernest Sosa distinguishes them: ‘a belief is safe iff it would be true if held, and sensitive iff it would not be held if false’. See ‘Reply to Keith DeRose’ in Ernest Sosa and His Critics, edited by John Greco, (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 276. In general, the more safety and sensitivity a belief enjoys, the stronger its alethic security.

⁹ See ‘Epistemic Operators’ and ‘The Pragmatic Dimension of Knowledge’ in his Perception, Knowledge and Belief: Selected Essays (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

¹⁰ See ‘Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge’, The Journal of Philosophy 73 (1976), 771–791CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ ‘The Theory of Questions, Epistemic Powers, and the Indexical Theory of Knowledge’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy V (1980), 193–237Google Scholar.

¹² ‘Skepticism, Relevant Alternatives, and Deductive Closure’, Philosophical Studies 29 (1976), 249–261CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹³ Knowledge and Evidence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 247.

¹⁴ Ibid., 245.

¹⁵ Theory of Knowledge (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1990), 163–164.