Fred Dretske facts for kids

Frederick Irwin "Fred" Dretske (born December 9, 1932 – died July 24, 2013) was an American philosopher. He was known for his important ideas about how we know things and how our minds work.

Biography

Fred Dretske was born to Frederick and Hattie Dretske. He first planned to become an engineer and studied at Purdue University. However, after taking just one philosophy course, he changed his mind. He decided that philosophy was what he truly wanted to do.

After finishing his electrical engineering degree in 1954, he served in the army. Then, he went to graduate school for philosophy at the University of Minnesota. He earned his PhD in 1960. His main research project was about the philosophy of time.

Dretske began his teaching career at the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1960. He became a full Professor there. In 1988, he moved to Stanford University. He was a special professor of philosophy there until he retired in 1998. After retiring, he continued his research at Stanford and Duke University until his death.

Dretske believed that our minds work in a way that connects them to the outside world. This idea is called externalism. He tried to show that when we look inside our own minds (introspection), we actually learn less than we might think. Later in his career, he focused on how we experience things consciously and how we know ourselves. He won the Jean Nicod Prize in 1994 for his work.

In 2003, he was chosen as a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. When he passed away, he was survived by his wife, Judith Fortson, his children, Kathleen and Ray Dretske, and his stepson, Ryan Fortson.

Fred Dretske's Philosophical Ideas

Seeing and Knowing (1969)

Dretske's first book, Seeing and Knowing, explored how we know something is true just by seeing it. He suggested that for you to know something is true by seeing it, several things must happen:

• The thing must actually be true.
• You must see the thing.
• The conditions under which you see it must be clear enough. This means it wouldn't look that way unless it was true.
• You must believe it is true because of what you see.

For example, to know the soup is boiling just by looking at it: the soup must be boiling, you must see the soup, it wouldn't look like that unless it was boiling, and you must believe it's boiling for that reason.

Knowledge and the Flow of Information (1981)

In this book, Dretske continued to study how we gain knowledge through what we see. But he added a new idea: information theory. He believed that understanding information was key to understanding knowledge and belief. He wrote, "In the beginning there was information. The word came later."

Dretske saw information as something real and measurable in the world, not just in our minds. He said that a signal carries information if it makes something certain. For example, a red light carries the information that a goal has been scored if, when you see the red light, you are certain a goal was scored.

With this idea of information, Dretske argued that we know something when our belief about it is caused by the information itself. This way, he focused on how our senses carry information, rather than on the mysterious parts of consciousness, to explain how we know things.

Explaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of Causes (1988)

Dretske's ideas about belief changed in his book Explaining Behavior. He suggested that our actions are not just movements. Instead, they are movements caused by our mental states, like beliefs. So, an action is partly a mental process itself.

He explained that a belief (like believing something is true) is a state in our brain. This brain state helps cause movements because it carries information. For example, if a brain state carries the information that "the door is open," it might cause you to walk through the door. This is how our beliefs guide our actions.

Dretske also noted that even if a brain state stops carrying the information it once did, it can still have the function of carrying that information. This is how we can sometimes have beliefs that are wrong, or "misrepresentations."

Naturalizing the Mind (1995)

Dretske's last major book was about consciousness. He wanted to show that all mental facts are about "representations." And all representations are about "informational functions." This is called the "Representational Thesis."

In Naturalizing the Mind, Dretske argued that when a brain state gains the job of carrying information (often through natural selection), it can become a state of consciousness. On the other hand, brain states that get their job through learning (like operant conditioning) become beliefs.

Other Philosophical Work

Besides his books, Fred Dretske was also known for his ideas about the laws of nature. He believed that these laws describe relationships between general properties or "universals."

In his 1970 article "Epistemic Operators," Dretske discussed how we know things and how this relates to philosophical skepticism. Skepticism is the idea that we can't really know anything for sure.

He looked at a principle called "epistemic closure." This principle says:

• If you know something (p).
• And you know that p means something else must be true (q).
• Then you also know that q is true.

For example:

• John knows he is eating oatmeal.
• John knows that eating oatmeal means he is not eating scrambled eggs.
• So, John knows he is not eating scrambled eggs.

However, skeptics can use this idea to argue that we don't know much. For instance, eating oatmeal means you're not being tricked by an evil demon into thinking you're eating oatmeal. Since John can't prove he's not being tricked, the skeptic might say John doesn't really know he's eating oatmeal.

To fight this, Dretske developed the relevant alternatives theory (RAT). This theory says that to know something, you only need to rule out the relevant possibilities. You don't need to rule out every wild or unlikely possibility.

According to RAT, the "evil demon" idea is an irrelevant possibility. So, John knows he is eating oatmeal because he can rule out relevant alternatives, like eating scrambled eggs or a bagel. He doesn't need to rule out being tricked by a demon.

One challenge with RAT is deciding what counts as a "relevant alternative." Dretske said a relevant alternative is something that "might have happened in the real world if the actual situation hadn't happened."

Selected publications

• 1969, Seeing and Knowing, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. ISBN: 0-7100-6213-3
• 1981, Knowledge and the Flow of Information, Cambridge, Massachusetts The MIT Press. ISBN: 0-262-04063-8
• 1988, Explaining Behavior: Reasons in a World of Causes, Cambridge, Massachusetts The MIT Press. ISBN: 0-262-04094-8
• 1995, Naturalizing the Mind, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. ISBN: 0-262-04149-9
• 2000, Perception, Knowledge and Belief, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 0-521-77742-9

See also

In Spanish: Fred Dretske para niños

• Relevant alternatives theory
• Jean Nicod Prize