The Architecture of Knowing: A Narrative Review of Epistemology, from Descartes's Foundations to Virtue's Reliabilism

Abstract

Epistemology is knowledge's architecture: the question of what justifies belief, answered by foundationalism's bedrock (Descartes's 1641 Meditations), by coherentism's web, by reliabilism's processes (Goldman's 1979), and by virtue epistemology's agent (Sosa's, Zagzebski's), after Edmund Gettier's 1963 two-page paper dismantled the justified-true-belief account and Quine's 1969 naturalization relocated the discipline. This article presents a narrative review of the primary literature of that architecture, from Descartes's 1641 Meditationes and Hume's 1739 Treatise, through Sellars's 1956 Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, Gettier's 1963 Analysis paper, Quine's 1969 Epistemology Naturalized, Goldman's 1979 reliabilism, BonJour's 1985 The Structure of Empirical Knowledge, Sosa's 1991 Knowledge in Perspective, Plantinga's 1993 Warrant and Proper Function, Zagzebski's 1996 Virtues of the Mind, Williamson's 2000 Knowledge and Its Limits, and Greco's 2010 Achieving Knowledge. The synthesis is organized around three themes: the foundational crisis, in which the given's authority and the regress's threat set the architecture's problems; the post-Gettier reconstructions, in which reliability, coherence, and warrant replaced justification's interior; and the virtue's settlement, in which the knower's character and the knowledge-first program rebuilt the discipline. It is concluded that epistemology's history is the justification's migration—from the mind's foundations, through the belief's processes, to the agent's virtues.