Chapter 1 Quiz: What Is Truth? Epistemological Foundations

Instructions: This quiz contains 25 questions across multiple formats. For self-study, attempt each question before revealing the answer. For classroom use, answers may be distributed separately.

Scoring Guide: - Multiple Choice: 1 point each - True/False: 1 point each - Fill-in-the-Blank: 1 point each - Short Answer: 2–4 points each (rubric provided)

Total Points: 40

Part I: Multiple Choice (1 point each)

Question 1

Which theory of truth holds that a statement is true if and only if it accurately describes a state of affairs in reality?

A) Coherence theory B) Pragmatic theory C) Correspondence theory D) Deflationary theory

Answer **C) Correspondence theory** The correspondence theory, rooted in Aristotle and dominant in commonsense thinking, holds that truth is a matter of matching or "corresponding" to facts in the world. "The Earth orbits the Sun" is true because the planet Earth does in fact travel around the Sun — a real state of affairs independent of our beliefs.

Question 2

Edmund Gettier (1963) challenged which classical account of knowledge?

A) The coherence theory of truth B) The Justified True Belief (JTB) account C) The pragmatic theory of knowledge D) Reliabilism

Answer **B) The Justified True Belief (JTB) account** Gettier's three-page paper showed through counterexample that a belief can be justified and true without constituting knowledge — because the justification can be connected to the truth only by epistemic luck. This decisively refuted the view, traced to Plato's dialogues, that knowledge = justified + true + believed.

Question 3

A person flips a coin, guesses "heads," and is correct. They claim to know it will come up heads. Which condition of JTB is most clearly not met?

A) Truth B) Belief C) Justification D) All three conditions are met

Answer **C) Justification** The guess happens to be true (the coin did land heads), and the person believes heads came up. But there is no justification — no good reasons or reliable process — behind the belief. A lucky guess does not constitute knowledge, which requires that the belief be based on appropriate evidence or reliable cognitive processes.

Question 4

The philosopher whose work identified "testimonial injustice" and "hermeneutical injustice" as forms of epistemic injustice is:

A) Alvin Goldman B) Philip Kitcher C) Miranda Fricker D) Jason Baehr

Answer **C) Miranda Fricker** Miranda Fricker's *Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing* (2007) introduced these two concepts. Testimonial injustice occurs when a speaker receives less credibility than they deserve due to prejudice (e.g., race or gender). Hermeneutical injustice occurs when someone lacks the shared conceptual resources to understand or communicate their own experience.

Question 5

The SIFT method for evaluating online information stands for:

A) Search, Identify, Fact-check, Trust B) Stop, Investigate, Find better coverage, Trace claims C) Scrutinize, Infer, Follow evidence, Think critically D) Source, Information, Facts, Truth

Answer **B) Stop, Investigate, Find better coverage, Trace claims** Developed by digital literacy educator Mike Caulfield, SIFT provides a practical workflow for evaluating online information: Stop before reacting or sharing; Investigate the source's track record; Find better coverage from multiple independent reliable sources; Trace claims, quotes, and media back to their origin.

Question 6

Which of the following is the most fundamental problem with strong epistemic relativism?

A) It ignores cultural differences in knowledge production B) It is contradicted by the success of modern science C) The claim "all truth is relative" undermines itself by claiming to be absolutely true D) It makes communication between cultures impossible

Answer **C) The claim "all truth is relative" undermines itself by claiming to be absolutely true** This is the self-refutation objection, the most fundamental logical problem with strong epistemic relativism. If all truth is relative, then the claim "all truth is relative" is itself only relatively true — true from some perspectives and false from others — which means it cannot be offered as a universal philosophical thesis. This is a performative contradiction: the act of asserting the thesis contradicts what the thesis claims.

Question 7

According to reliabilism (Alvin Goldman), a belief constitutes knowledge if:

A) It coheres with the rest of the believer's beliefs B) It is produced by a reliable cognitive process — one that tends to produce true beliefs C) It is useful for achieving the believer's goals D) It is accepted by the relevant expert community

Answer **B) It is produced by a reliable cognitive process — one that tends to produce true beliefs** Reliabilism is a post-Gettier theory that defines knowledge in terms of the reliability of the process that produced the belief, rather than purely in terms of internal justification. Perception, memory, and careful inference are generally reliable; wishful thinking, hasty generalization, and motivated reasoning are not. This explains Gettier cases: the processes involved are unreliable or accidentally connected to the truth.

Question 8

The "Dunning-Kruger effect" refers to:

A) The tendency to believe information that is emotionally appealing B) The tendency for people with limited expertise to overestimate their competence in a domain C) The systematic distrust of expert consensus D) The persistence of false beliefs after correction

Answer **B) The tendency for people with limited expertise to overestimate their competence in a domain** Psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger (1999) documented that people with limited knowledge in a domain tend to lack the metacognitive awareness to recognize their own incompetence. The paradox: what you need to know what you don't know is the very knowledge you don't have. This is directly relevant to misinformation, where confident amateurs often sound more certain than cautious experts.

Question 9

"Motivated reasoning" describes:

A) Using emotions to make decisions when logic fails B) The tendency to reason backward from a desired conclusion, finding justifications rather than following evidence C) The appropriate use of values in making normative judgments D) The scientific method of forming hypotheses before testing them

Answer **B) The tendency to reason backward from a desired conclusion, finding justifications rather than following evidence** Motivated reasoning, documented extensively by psychologist Ziva Kunda and others, occurs when people use their reasoning capacity to rationalize conclusions that are emotionally or identity-congruent, rather than to reach accurate conclusions. The reasoning capacity is genuine — but it is deployed in service of confirmation rather than truth-seeking.

Question 10

Which approach to belief correction involves exposing people to weakened forms of manipulative techniques before they encounter the real thing?

A) Debunking B) Inoculation (prebunking) C) The backfire method D) Source correction

Answer **B) Inoculation (prebunking)** Drawing on the analogy to biological vaccination, inoculation theory (developed by researchers including Sander van der Linden) holds that exposing people to a "weakened dose" of manipulative misinformation techniques — explaining the technique and giving an example — immunizes them against the technique when they encounter it in the wild. It is generally more effective than debunking after the fact.

Part II: True/False (1 point each)

For each statement, indicate True or False and briefly explain your reasoning (2–3 sentences).

Question 11

True or False: The coherence theory of truth implies that a belief system can be true even if it has no connection to empirical reality, so long as its claims are internally consistent with each other.

Answer **True** (and this is a *problem* for the coherence theory, not a virtue) This is one of the most serious objections to the coherence theory. Multiple incompatible belief systems can be internally coherent — a geocentric cosmology and a heliocentric cosmology can each be internally consistent — but they cannot both be true. The coherence theory, taken alone, cannot adjudicate between incompatible coherent systems. This is why most philosophers believe coherence is necessary but not sufficient for truth.

Question 12

True or False: Social epistemology holds that knowledge is purely a social construction, meaning there is no objective truth independent of social agreement.

Answer **False** Social epistemology examines the social dimensions of knowledge — how knowledge is distributed, how testimony works, how institutions shape inquiry — without claiming that knowledge is "merely" social or that truth is whatever a community agrees on. Alvin Goldman, a founder of social epistemology, explicitly grounds his approach in a reliabilist theory that aims at objective truth. Social processes are the means by which humans access objective truth, not the basis of truth itself.

Question 13

True or False: According to the correspondence theory of truth, the claim "Torturing innocent people for fun is morally wrong" cannot be straightforwardly true or false.

Answer **True** (though this is contested) This represents a genuine challenge for correspondence theory. For empirical claims, the "facts" that claims correspond to are physical states of affairs. But moral claims like "Torturing innocents is wrong" don't obviously correspond to any physical fact. Moral realists argue there are moral facts to correspond to; non-cognitivists argue moral claims are not truth-apt at all; expressivists say they express attitudes rather than describe reality. This is an active philosophical debate.

Question 14

True or False: A belief can be epistemically rational to hold even if it turns out to be false.

Answer **True** Epistemic rationality concerns the quality of one's justification and reasoning process, not the truth of the conclusion. A doctor who carefully examines all available evidence and concludes that a patient has condition X is being epistemically rational — even if new tests later reveal it was condition Y. Rational belief formation can still lead to false conclusions when the available evidence is misleading, incomplete, or when the world is simply hard to read. This is why epistemologists distinguish between epistemic rationality and truth.

Question 15

True or False: The "backfire effect" — where corrections of false beliefs cause people to hold those beliefs more strongly — has been robustly replicated across many studies and is now a well-established psychological phenomenon.

Answer **False** The backfire effect, originally proposed by Nyhan and Reifler (2010), has proven difficult to replicate in subsequent research. Meta-analyses of correction studies generally show that corrections do reduce false beliefs, though the effect is often modest. The persistence of the false belief about the backfire effect is itself somewhat ironic — it illustrates how compelling initial findings spread widely even before replication. The broader lesson — that corrections are often less effective than believed — does hold, but the dramatic "corrections make things worse" version does not.

Part III: Fill in the Blank (1 point each)

Question 16

The classical philosophical account of knowledge holds that knowledge requires three conditions: the belief must be _, the person must _ it, and the belief must be ____.

Answer **True** / **believe** / **justified** This is the Justified True Belief (JTB) account of knowledge, formalized in twentieth-century analytic philosophy and derived from discussions in Plato's *Meno* and *Theaetetus*. All three conditions are necessary: truth ensures we are not wrong, belief ensures we actually hold the claim, and justification ensures we arrived at it through appropriate epistemic means rather than by luck.

Question 17

The tendency to search for, interpret, and remember information in ways that confirm one's preexisting beliefs is called ____.

Answer **Confirmation bias** Confirmation bias is one of the most extensively documented and practically significant cognitive biases. It affects information search (we look for confirming evidence), interpretation (we interpret ambiguous evidence as confirming), and memory (we better remember confirming instances). It is a primary driver of the persistence of false beliefs and conspiracy theories.

Question 18

Philosopher ____ introduced the concepts of "testimonial injustice" and "hermeneutical injustice" in her 2007 book Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing.

Answer **Miranda Fricker** Fricker's work opened a new area of inquiry at the intersection of epistemology, ethics, and social philosophy, examining how social power dynamics shape who gets treated as a credible knower and what conceptual resources communities have available to understand shared experiences.

Question 19

The view that beliefs produced by reliable cognitive processes constitute knowledge is called ____.

Answer **Reliabilism** (or "process reliabilism") Developed especially by Alvin Goldman, reliabilism shifts the focus of epistemology from internal justification (what reasons the agent can articulate) to the reliability of the cognitive processes that produce beliefs (perception, memory, inference, testimony). A belief counts as knowledge if it is the output of a process that, in general, tends to produce true beliefs.

Question 20

The political and media environment in which objective facts are less influential than emotional appeals in shaping public opinion has been termed ____.

Answer **Post-truth** "Post-truth" was named Oxford Dictionaries' Word of the Year in 2016, reflecting the political climate surrounding the Brexit referendum and the U.S. presidential election. Post-truth discourse does not typically deny the existence of truth but rather relegates it to secondary importance relative to emotional resonance and tribal identity in public persuasion.

Part IV: Short Answer (2–4 points each)

Provide a focused, well-reasoned response of 4–8 sentences. Full credit requires accurate use of key concepts, clear reasoning, and specific examples.

Question 21 (2 points)

Explain the difference between epistemic humility and radical skepticism. Why is epistemological humility a virtue, while radical skepticism is (arguably) not?

Answer **Full credit answer (2 points):** Epistemic humility is the disposition to accurately recognize the limits of one's knowledge — being appropriately uncertain where evidence is weak, genuinely open to revision, and non-dogmatic in holding beliefs. Radical skepticism, by contrast, is the philosophical position that knowledge is impossible or that we can never be justified in believing anything — effectively suspending all belief. Epistemic humility is a virtue because it tracks the actual epistemic situation: evidence is often incomplete, reasoning is fallible, and reasonable people can disagree. It makes knowers more accurate and responsive to evidence. Radical skepticism, while philosophically interesting, cannot be consistently lived and produces practical paralysis. If one is radically skeptical even of clear and overwhelming evidence (that other minds exist, that the external world is real), one cannot function as an epistemic agent at all. A practically useful epistemology needs calibrated confidence — strong where evidence is strong, uncertain where evidence is weak — not wholesale suspension of judgment.

Question 22 (3 points)

Explain what a Gettier problem is, using either one of Gettier's original cases or an original example. Why does it matter for how we think about knowledge?

Answer **Full credit answer (3 points):** A Gettier problem is a case where someone has a justified true belief that nonetheless falls short of knowledge, because the justification and the truth are connected only by epistemic luck. In Gettier's famous example: Smith has strong evidence that Jones will get a job and knows Jones has ten coins in his pocket. He infers "The person who will get the job has ten coins in their pocket." But Smith himself gets the job — and unbeknownst to Smith, he also has exactly ten coins in his pocket. Smith's belief is true, justified, and believed — yet we sense he doesn't know it; he believed the right thing for the wrong reasons about the wrong person. Gettier cases matter because they show that knowledge is not simply a matter of having accurate beliefs supported by good-seeming reasons. There must be an appropriate *connection* between why you believe something and what makes it true. This insight generated decades of post-Gettier epistemology. Practically, it reminds us that arriving at a true conclusion through a flawed or lucky process leaves us epistemically fragile — without the genuine understanding that would allow us to transfer knowledge to related questions or recognize when the conclusion no longer holds.

Question 23 (3 points)

Explain the concept of social epistemology and describe one way it is relevant to understanding how misinformation spreads or can be countered.

Answer **Full credit answer (3 points):** Social epistemology examines the social dimensions of knowledge: how testimony transmits information between people, how epistemic labor is divided among specialists, how institutions shape what counts as knowledge, and how communities collectively form and revise beliefs. Rather than treating knowledge as a purely individual achievement, social epistemology recognizes that virtually all human knowledge depends on networks of trust, communication, and shared practice. This framework illuminates misinformation in multiple ways. One direct application is the concept of epistemic infrastructure: just as physical infrastructure (roads, utilities) enables economic activity, epistemic infrastructure (trusted news institutions, peer review, fact-checking norms) enables reliable collective belief formation. Misinformation campaigns often work by attacking this infrastructure — undermining trust in mainstream media, scientific institutions, and fact-checkers. When epistemic infrastructure is damaged, individuals lose reliable anchors and become more susceptible to alternative information ecosystems with lower evidential standards. Rebuilding epistemic trust is therefore not merely a communication challenge but an institutional one: it requires re-establishing credible, accountable epistemic institutions that people have good reasons to trust.

Question 24 (4 points)

A classmate says: "Science is always changing its mind, so we can't really trust what scientists say. Remember when they said eggs were bad, then good? Why should I believe scientists about COVID or climate change?"

Using concepts from this chapter, identify the epistemological errors in this argument and explain what a more accurate picture of scientific knowledge would look like.

Answer **Full credit answer (4 points):** This argument contains several interrelated epistemological errors. First, it commits a version of the "appeal to inconsistency" fallacy — treating any revision of scientific claims as evidence of unreliability, when in fact the willingness to revise beliefs in response to new evidence is precisely what makes science reliable. A belief system that never revises is dogmatic, not trustworthy. Science's track record of self-correction is a feature, not a bug. Second, the argument commits a false equivalence between different kinds of scientific claims. Nutritional science, which deals with extraordinarily complex interactions among diet, genetics, environment, and health, with effects measured over decades, is genuinely difficult and subject to more revision than claims about global temperature trends or viral transmission — which are supported by multiple independent lines of evidence from physics, chemistry, biology, and atmospheric science converging on the same conclusions. Third, the argument ignores the concept of scientific consensus and how it forms. Isolated findings (the "eggs" example typically refers to changing epidemiological guidance based on ambiguous observational data) are very different from broad consensus representing the convergence of thousands of independent studies, multiple disciplines, and decades of peer review. Climate change is not "scientists changing their mind" — it is an increasingly strengthening consensus supported by more and more lines of evidence. A more accurate picture of scientific knowledge acknowledges that science produces claims with varying degrees of certainty; that revision in light of new evidence is epistemically virtuous; that scientific consensus, while not infallible, represents the best available knowledge in a domain; and that the appropriate response to scientific consensus is calibrated trust — not dogmatic acceptance and not wholesale skepticism — adjusted for the quality of the evidence and the track record of the relevant research community.

Question 25 (3 points)

Explain the concept of manufactured doubt and describe how it exploits legitimate epistemological concepts. What distinguishes manufactured doubt from genuine scientific uncertainty?

Answer **Full credit answer (3 points):** Manufactured doubt, documented by historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway in *Merchants of Doubt* (2010), is a deliberate strategic practice — pioneered by the tobacco industry and later used by fossil fuel interests, chemical companies, and others — of creating the *appearance* of scientific controversy about established findings in order to forestall regulatory or policy responses. The strategy does not require winning the scientific argument; it only needs to convince the public (and policymakers) that "the science isn't settled." The strategy exploits legitimate epistemological concepts. It appeals to the genuine value of skepticism and open debate in science: if science should be self-critical, shouldn't we consider dissenting voices? It exploits the genuine fact that no scientific finding is 100% certain, using this to imply that established consensus (e.g., that smoking causes cancer, that CFCs deplete the ozone layer, that CO2 causes warming) is no more reliable than fringe alternatives. It uses the structure of media coverage — which often presents "both sides" — to give marginal dissenting scientists airtime disproportionate to their standing in their field. Genuine scientific uncertainty, by contrast, is characterized by: real disagreement among expert researchers who are genuinely trying to find the truth; acknowledgment of uncertainty by mainstream scientists themselves; uncertainty concentrated at the edges rather than the core of established findings; and the absence of funding by parties with financial stakes in a particular outcome. Manufactured doubt, by contrast, is concentrated at the interface of science and policy, often funded by interested parties, and features spokespeople with tenuous connections to the relevant research literature.

End of Chapter 1 Quiz

Total Points: 40

Grading Scale (suggested): - 36–40: Excellent - 30–35: Proficient - 22–29: Developing - Below 22: Needs review — revisit chapter sections indicated by missed questions