The "Entailment Thesis" In Contemporary Epistemology

In contemporary epistemology,philosophers try to explain the related issues of knowledge from various angles.As a branch of the epistemology,the entailment thesis mainly discusses whether knowledge can be obtained through perception.Therefore,the entailment thesis is essentially a question of perception.Once we accept the entailment thesis,we can explain how we acquire knowledge（that is,we obtain knowledge by seeing）.Like most problems in the history of philosophy,the validity of the entailment thesis is full of disputes.This article will start from the basic theory of entailment thesis,give a detailed description of the viewpoints of both parties in the dispute,and fully understand the entailment thesis from different angles and perspectives.This paper is mainly divided into four parts.The first part makes a distinction between the traditional entailment thesis and the contemporary entailment thesis,and explains some synonymous but different names in the entailment thesis.The second part mainly defends and refutes the contemporary entailment thesis from the conceptual analysis of seeing,in which the theoretical basis is Dretske’s analysis of seeing,while Paul O’Connor refutes Dretske’s analysis of seeing.Finally,by analyzing the English context of seeing,French comprehensively considers three different meanings of seeing,constructs a Visuo-Epistemic Model of “See”,and defends the contemporary entailment thesis through this model.The third part mainly defends and refutes the contemporary entailment thesis from the theory of knowledge priority,in which the theoretical basis is Williamson’s theory of knowledge priority,and then examines Turri and Reed refutation of Williamson’s theory of knowledge priority.Finally,through the argument made by Ranalli,responded to the above objection,and then defended the contemporary entailment thesis.The fourth part defends and refutes the contemporary entailment thesis mainly from epistemological disjunctiveism.The theoretical basis is Pritchard’s epistemological disjunctiveism,and then it examines three problems faced by epistemological disjunctiveism.Due to the difficulty of solving the problems,Pritchard had to give up entailment thesis in order to preserve epistemological disjunctiveism.The last part is a re-examination of the basis problem,and finally defends the contemporary entailment thesis.