title: The Legend of Zelda

text: Multiple members of the game industry have expressed how Zelda games have impacted them, including Rockstar Games founder and "Grand Theft Auto" director, Dan Houser, who said that "Zelda" and "Mario" games on Nintendo 64 greatly influenced them in developing "Grand Theft Auto" series, as well in other 3D games in general. Rockstar founder and "Grand Theft Auto" director Sam Houser also cited the influence of "Zelda", describing "Grand Theft Auto III" as "Zelda meets Goodfellas". "Ōkami" director Hideki Kamiya (Capcom, PlatinumGames) said that he has been influenced by "The Legend of Zelda" series in developing the game, citing "" as his favorite game of all time. "Soul Reaver" and "Uncharted" director, Amy Hennig (Crystal Dynamics and Naughty Dog), cited "Zelda" as inspiration for the "Legacy of Kain" series, noting "A Link to the Past"s influence on "Blood Omen" and "Ocarina of Time"'s influence on "Soul Reaver". "Soul Reaver" and "Uncharted" creator, Richard Lemarchand (Crystal Dynamics and Naughty Dog), also cited "A Link to the Past"s approach to combining gameplay with storytelling as inspiration for "Soul Reaver". "Wing Commander" and "Star Citizen" director, Chris Roberts (Origin Systems and Cloud Imperium Games), cited "Zelda" as an influence on his action role-playing game, "Times of Lore".


title: The Legend of Zelda

text: "Souls" creator Hidetaka Miyazaki (FromSoftware) named "A Link To The Past" as one of his favorite role-playing video games. Miyazaki also described "The Legend of Zelda" as a sort of textbook for 3D action games. "Ico" director Fumito Ueda (Team Ico) cited "Zelda" as an influence on "Shadow of the Colossus". Peter Molyneux (Lionhead Studios and Microsoft Studios) stated that the "" is one of his favorite games and an influence for the "Fable" series. "Darksiders" director David Adams (Vigil Games) cited "Zelda" as an influence on his work. "Prince of Persia" and "Assassin's Creed" director Raphael Lacoste (Ubisoft) cited "The Wind Waker" as an influence on "". CD Projekt Red ("The Witcher", "Cyberpunk 2077") cited the "Zelda" series as an influence on "The Witcher" series, including "". Alex Hall cited as the primary influence on their "Ben Drowned" web serial and web series. "Final Fantasy" and "The 3rd Birthday" director Hajime Tabata (Square Enix) cited "Ocarina of Time" as inspiration for the seamless open world of "Final Fantasy XV".


title: The Legend of Zelda

text: A 13-episode American animated TV series, adapted by DiC and distributed by Viacom Enterprises, aired in 1989. The animated "Zelda" shorts were broadcast each Friday, instead of the usual "Super Mario Bros." cartoon which was aired during the rest of the week. The series loosely follows the two NES "Zelda" games (the original "The Legend of Zelda" and "The Adventure of Link"), mixing settings and characters from those games with original creations. The show's older incarnations of both Link and Zelda appeared in various episodes of "" during its second season.


title: The Legend of Zelda

text: A live-action television series had been in development around 2015, as reported from an anonymous Netflix employee to "The Wall Street Journal". The program was a joint effort between Netflix and Nintendo, and was said to be aimed as a family-friendly version of "Game of Thrones". Further details of this series went sparse until 2021 when Adam Conover gave an interview regarding his "College Humor" period. There, the "College Humor" team had been planning a skit that would have combined "Star Fox" with "Fantastic Mr. Fox" and had even had talked to Miyamoto on the project. Conover said that they were told about a month into the project that Nintendo had requested they stop all work on the project as a result of the leak related to the live-action "Zelda" show; Nintendo, already protective of its IP, had pulled many external projects including the live-action show.


title: The Legend of Zelda

text: Valiant Comics released a short series of comics featuring characters and settings from the "Zelda" cartoon as part of their "Nintendo Comics System" line. Manga adaptations of many entries in the series, including "A Link to the Past", "Ocarina of Time", "Majora's Mask", "Oracle of Seasons" and "Oracle of Ages", "Four Swords Adventures", "The Minish Cap", "Phantom Hourglass", and "Twilight Princess" have been produced under license from Nintendo, primarily written and drawn by Japanese artist duo Akira Himekawa. These adaptations do not strictly follow the plot of the games from which they are based and may contain additional story elements.


title: The Legend of Zelda

text: A number of official books, novels, and gamebooks have been released based on the series as well. The earliest was "Moblin's Magic Spear", published in 1989 by Western Publishing under their Golden Books Family Entertainment division and written by Jack C. Harris. It took place sometime during the first game. Two gamebooks were published as part of the "Nintendo Adventure Books" series by Archway, both of which were written by Matt Wayne. The first was "The Crystal Trap" (which focuses more on Zelda) and the second was "The Shadow Prince". Both were released in 1992. A novel based on "Ocarina of Time" was released in 1999, written by Jason R. Rich and published by Sybex Inc. under their "Pathways to Adventure" series. Another two gamebooks were released as part of the "You Decide on the Adventure" series published by Scholastic. The first book was based on "Oracle of Seasons" and was released in 2001. The second, based on "Oracle of Ages", was released in 2002. Both were written by Craig Wessel. In 2006, Scholastic released a novel as part of their "Nintendo Heroes" series, "Link and the Portal of Doom". It was written by Tracey West and was set shortly after the events of "Ocarina of Time".


title: The Legend of Zelda

text: In 2011, to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the series, an art book was published exclusively in Japan under the name "" by Shogakukan. It contains concept art from the series's conception to the release of "Skyward Sword" in 2011 and multiple essays about the production of the games, as well as an overarching timeline of the series. It also includes a prequel manga to "Skyward Sword" by Akira Himekawa. The book received an international release by publisher Dark Horse Comics on January 29, 2013; it took the number one spot on Amazon's sales chart, taking the spot away from E. L. James's "50 Shades of Grey" trilogy. Dark Horse released "The Legend of Zelda: Art & Artifacts", a follow-up art book to "Hyrule Historia" containing additional artwork and interviews, in North America and Europe in February 2017.


title: The Legend of Zelda

text: Taking place in Cologne, Germany, on September 23, 2010, the video game music concert "Symphonic Legends" focused on music from Nintendo and, among others, featured games such as "The Legend of Zelda". Following an intermission, the second half of the concert was entirely dedicated to an expansive symphonic poem dedicated to the series. The 35-minute epic tells the story of Link's evolution from child to hero.


title: The Legend of Zelda

text: To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the series in 2011, Nintendo commissioned an original symphony, "". The show was originally performed in the fall of 2011 in Los Angeles and consists of live performances of much of the music from the series. It has since been scheduled for 18 shows so far throughout the United States and Canada. Nintendo released a CD, "The Legend of Zelda 25th Anniversary Special Orchestra CD". Featuring eight tracks from live performances of the symphony, the CD is included alongside the special edition of "The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword" for the Wii. Nintendo later celebrated "The Legend of Zelda" 30th anniversary with an album which was released in Japan in February 2017.


title: The Legend of Zelda

text: "The Legend of Zelda"-themed "Monopoly" board game was released in the United States in September 2014. A "Clue" board game in the style of "The Legend of Zelda" series was released in June 2017. A "UNO"-styled "The Legend of Zelda" game was released in February 2018, exclusively at GameStop in North America.


title: The Legend of Zelda

text: In 2007, Imagi Animation Studios, which had provided the animation for "TMNT" and "Astro Boy", created a pitch reel for a computer-animated "The Legend of Zelda" movie. Nintendo did not accept the studio's offer due to the memory of the failure of the 1993 live-action movie adaption of "Super Mario Bros."


title: The Legend of Zelda

text: In 2013, Aonuma stated that, if development of a film began, the company would want to use the opportunity to embrace audience interaction in some capacity.


title: Epistemology

text: Epistemology (; ), or the theory of knowledge, is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemology is considered a major subfield of philosophy, along with other major subfields such as ethics, logic, and metaphysics.


title: Epistemology

text: Epistemologists study the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge, epistemic justification, the rationality of belief, and various related issues.


title: Epistemology

text: In these debates and others, epistemology aims to answer questions such as "What do we know?", "What does it mean to say that we know something?", "What makes justified beliefs justified?", and "How do we know that we know?".


title: Epistemology

text: The word "epistemology" is derived from the ancient Greek "epistēmē", meaning "knowledge", and the suffix "-logia", meaning "logical discourse" (derived from the Greek word "logos" meaning "discourse"). The word's appearance in English was predated by the German term "Wissenschaftslehre" (literally, theory of science), which was introduced by philosophers Johann Fichte and Bernard Bolzano in the late 18th century. The word "epistemology" first appeared in 1847, in a review in New York's "Eclectic Magazine". It was first used as a translation of the word "Wissenschaftslehre" as it appears in a philosophical novel by German author Jean Paul:


title: Epistemology

text: The word "epistemology" was properly introduced into Anglophone philosophical literature by Scottish philosopher James Frederick Ferrier in 1854, who used it in his "Institutes of Metaphysics":


title: Epistemology

text: It is important to note that the French term "épistémologie" is used with a different and far narrower meaning than the English term "epistemology", being used by French philosophers to refer solely to philosophy of science. For instance, Émile Meyerson opened his "Identity and Reality", written in 1908, with the remark that the word 'is becoming current' as equivalent to 'the philosophy of the sciences.'


title: Epistemology

text: Epistemology, as a distinct field of inquiry, predates the introduction of the term into the lexicon of philosophy. John Locke, for instance, described his efforts in "Essay Concerning Human Understanding" (1689) as an inquiry "into the original, certainty, and extent of human knowledge, together with the grounds and degrees of belief, opinion, and assent".


title: Epistemology

text: Almost every major historical philosopher has considered questions about what we know and how we know it. Among the Ancient Greek philosophers, Plato distinguished between inquiry regarding what we know and inquiry regarding what exists, particularly in the "Republic", the "Theaetetus", and the "Meno". A number of important epistemological concerns also appeared in the works of Aristotle.


title: Epistemology

text: During the subsequent Hellenistic period, philosophical schools began to appear which had a greater focus on epistemological questions, often in the form of philosophical skepticism. For instance, the Pyrrhonian skepticism of Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus held that eudaimonia (flourishing, happiness, or "the good life") could be attained through the application of epoché (suspension of judgment) regarding all non-evident matters. Pyrrhonism was particularly concerned with undermining the epistemological dogmas of Stoicism and Epicureanism. The other major school of Hellenistic skepticism was Academic skepticism, most notably defended by Carneades and Arcesilaus, which predominated in the Platonic Academy for almost two centuries.


title: Epistemology

text: In ancient India the Ajñana school of ancient Indian philosophy promoted skepticism. Ajñana was a Śramaṇa movement and a major rival of early Buddhism, Jainism and the Ājīvika school. They held that it was impossible to obtain knowledge of metaphysical nature or ascertain the truth value of philosophical propositions; and even if knowledge was possible, it was useless and disadvantageous for final salvation. They were specialized in refutation without propagating any positive doctrine of their own.


title: Epistemology

text: After the ancient philosophical era but before the modern philosophical era, a number of Medieval philosophers also engaged with epistemological questions at length. Most notable among the Medievals for their contributions to epistemology were Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham.


title: Epistemology

text: In the Islamic epistemology Islamic Golden Age which was booming prior to the Age of Enlightenment in Europe. One of the most prominent and influential philosophers, theologians, jurists, logicians and mystics Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali wrote over 70 books, including his best-known work in 1107 CE, his spiritual autobiography, "Deliverance from Error" (Al-Munqidh min al-Dalal). In this book Al-Ghazali was seeking to know what we can be certain about: what is true knowledge and not just opinion? To accomplish this goal, he would first consider what kinds of things we can know. This involves a study of epistemology, the theory of knowledge.


title: Epistemology

text: Epistemology largely came to the fore in philosophy during the early modern period, which historians of philosophy traditionally divide up into a dispute between empiricists (including Francis Bacon, John Locke, David Hume, and George Berkeley) and rationalists (including René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Leibniz). The debate between them has often been framed using the question of whether knowledge comes primarily from sensory experience (empiricism), or whether a significant portion of our knowledge is derived entirely from our faculty of reason (rationalism). According to some scholars, this dispute was resolved in the late 18th century by Immanuel Kant, whose transcendental idealism famously made room for the view that "though all our knowledge begins with experience, it by no means follows that all [knowledge] arises out of experience".


title: Epistemology

text: There are a number of different methods that contemporary scholars use when trying to understand the relationship between past epistemology and contemporary epistemology. One of the most contentious questions is this: "Should we assume that the problems of epistemology are perennial, and that trying to reconstruct and evaluate Plato's or Hume's or Kant's arguments is meaningful for current debates, too?" Similarly, there is also a question of whether contemporary philosophers should aim to "rationally reconstruct and evaluate" historical views in epistemology, or to "merely describe" them. Barry Stroud claims that doing epistemology competently requires the historical study of past attempts to find philosophical understanding of the nature and scope of human knowledge. He argues that since inquiry may progress over time, we may not realize how different the questions that contemporary epistemologists ask are from questions asked at various different points in the history of philosophy.


title: Epistemology

text: Nearly all debates in epistemology are in some way related to knowledge. Most generally, "knowledge" is a familiarity, awareness, or understanding of someone or something, which might include facts (propositional knowledge), skills (procedural knowledge), or objects (acquaintance knowledge). Philosophers tend to draw an important distinction between three different senses of "knowing" something: "knowing that" (knowing the truth of propositions), "knowing how" (understanding how to perform certain actions), and "knowing by acquaintance" (directly perceiving an object, being familiar with it, or otherwise coming into contact with it). Epistemology is primarily concerned with the first of these forms of knowledge, propositional knowledge. All three senses of "knowing" can be seen in our ordinary use of the word. In mathematics, you can know 2 + 2 = 4, but there is also knowing to add two numbers, and knowing a (e.g., knowing other persons, or knowing oneself), (e.g., one's hometown), (e.g., cars), or (e.g., addition). While these distinctions are not explicit in English, they are explicitly made in other languages, including French, Portuguese, Spanish, Romanian, German and Dutch (although some languages closely related to English have been said to retain these verbs, such as Scots). The theoretical interpretation and significance of these linguistic issues remains controversial.


title: Epistemology

text: In his paper "On Denoting" and his later book "Problems of Philosophy", Bertrand Russell brought a great deal of attention to the distinction between "knowledge by description" and "knowledge by acquaintance". Gilbert Ryle is similarly credited with bringing more attention to the distinction between knowing how and knowing that in "The Concept of Mind". In "Personal Knowledge", Michael Polanyi argues for the epistemological relevance of knowledge how and knowledge that; using the example of the act of balance involved in riding a bicycle, he suggests that the theoretical knowledge of the physics involved in maintaining a state of balance cannot substitute for the practical knowledge of how to ride, and that it is important to understand how both are established and grounded. This position is essentially Ryle's, who argued that a failure to acknowledge the distinction between "knowledge that" and "knowledge how" leads to infinite regress.


title: Epistemology

text: One of the most important distinctions in epistemology is between what can be known "a priori" (independently of experience) and what can be known "a posteriori" (through experience). The terms originate from the Analytic methods of Aristotle's Organon, and may be roughly defined as follows:


title: Epistemology

text: Views that emphasize the importance of "a priori" knowledge are generally classified as rationalist. Views that emphasize the importance of "a posteriori" knowledge are generally classified as empiricist.


title: Epistemology

text: One of the core concepts in epistemology is "belief". A belief is an attitude that a person holds regarding anything that they take to be true. For instance, to believe that snow is white is comparable to accepting the truth of the proposition "snow is white". Beliefs can be "occurrent" (e.g. a person actively thinking "snow is white"), or they can be "dispositional" (e.g. a person who if asked about the color of snow would assert "snow is white"). While there is not universal agreement about the nature of belief, most contemporary philosophers hold the view that a disposition to express belief "B" qualifies as holding the belief "B". There are various different ways that contemporary philosophers have tried to describe beliefs, including as representations of ways that the world could be (Jerry Fodor), as dispositions to act as if certain things are true (Roderick Chisholm), as interpretive schemes for making sense of someone's actions (Daniel Dennett and Donald Davidson), or as mental states that fill a particular function (Hilary Putnam). Some have also attempted to offer significant revisions to our notion of belief, including eliminativists about belief who argue that there is no phenomenon in the natural world which corresponds to our folk psychological concept of belief (Paul Churchland) and formal epistemologists who aim to replace our bivalent notion of belief ("either I have a belief or I don't have a belief") with the more permissive, probabilistic notion of credence ("there is an entire spectrum of degrees of belief, not a simple dichotomy between belief and non-belief").


title: Epistemology

text: While belief plays a significant role in epistemological debates surrounding knowledge and justification, it also has many other philosophical debates in its own right. Notable debates include: "What is the rational way to revise one's beliefs when presented with various sorts of evidence?"; "Is the content of our beliefs entirely determined by our mental states, or do the relevant facts have any bearing on our beliefs (e.g. if I believe that I'm holding a glass of water, is the non-mental fact that water is HO part of the content of that belief)?"; "How fine-grained or coarse-grained are our beliefs?"; and "Must it be possible for a belief to be expressible in language, or are there non-linguistic beliefs?"


title: Epistemology

text: Truth is the property or state of being in accordance with facts or reality. On most views, truth is the correspondence of language or thought to a mind-independent world. This is called the correspondence theory of truth. Among philosophers who think that it is possible to analyze the conditions necessary for knowledge, virtually all of them accept that truth is such a condition. There is much less agreement about the extent to which a knower must know "why" something is true in order to know. On such views, something being known implies that it is true. However, this should not be confused for the more contentious view that one must know that one knows in order to know (the KK principle).


title: Epistemology

text: Epistemologists disagree about whether belief is the only truth-bearer. Other common suggestions for things that can bear the property of being true include propositions, sentences, thoughts, utterances, and judgments. Plato, in his Gorgias, argues that belief is the most commonly invoked truth-bearer.


title: Epistemology

text: Many of the debates regarding truth are at the crossroads of epistemology and logic. Some contemporary debates regarding truth include: How do we define truth? Is it even possible to give an informative definition of truth? What things are truth-bearers and are therefore capable of being true or false? Are truth and falsity bivalent, or are there other truth values? What are the criteria of truth that allow us to identify it and to distinguish it from falsity? What role does truth play in constituting knowledge? And is truth absolute, or is it merely relative to one's perspective?


title: Epistemology

text: As the term "justification" is used in epistemology, a belief is justified if one has good reason for holding it. Loosely speaking, justification is the "reason" that someone holds a rationally admissible belief, on the assumption that it is a "good reason" for holding it. Sources of justification might include perceptual experience (the evidence of the senses), reason, and authoritative testimony, among others. Importantly however, a belief being justified does "not" guarantee that the belief is true, since a person could be justified in forming beliefs based on very convincing evidence that was nonetheless deceiving.


title: Epistemology

text: A central debate about the nature of justification is a debate between epistemological externalists on the one hand and epistemological internalists on the other. While epistemic externalism first arose in attempts to overcome the Gettier problem, it has flourished in the time since as an alternative way of conceiving of epistemic justification. The initial development of epistemic externalism is often attributed to Alvin Goldman, although numerous other philosophers have worked on the topic in the time since.


title: Epistemology

text: Externalists hold that factors deemed "external", meaning outside of the psychological states of those who gain knowledge, can be conditions of justification. For example, an externalist response to the Gettier problem is to say that for a justified true belief to count as knowledge, there must be a link or dependency between the belief and the state of the external world. Usually, this is understood to be a causal link. Such causation, to the extent that it is "outside" the mind, would count as an external, knowledge-yielding condition. Internalists, on the other hand, assert that all knowledge-yielding conditions are within the psychological states of those who gain knowledge.


title: Epistemology

text: Though unfamiliar with the internalist/externalist debate himself, many point to René Descartes as an early example of the internalist path to justification. He wrote that because the only method by which we perceive the external world is through our senses, and that, because the senses are not infallible, we should not consider our concept of knowledge infallible. The only way to find anything that could be described as "indubitably true", he advocates, would be to see things "clearly and distinctly". He argued that if there is an omnipotent, good being who made the world, then it's reasonable to believe that people are made with the ability to know. However, this does not mean that man's ability to know is perfect. God gave man the ability to know but not with omniscience. Descartes said that man must use his capacities for knowledge correctly and carefully through methodological doubt.


title: Epistemology

text: The dictum "Cogito ergo sum" (I think, therefore I am) is also commonly associated with Descartes's theory. In his own methodological doubt—doubting everything he previously knew so he could start from a blank slate—the first thing that he could not logically bring himself to doubt was his own existence: "I do not exist" would be a contradiction in terms. The act of saying that one does not exist assumes that someone must be making the statement in the first place. Descartes could doubt his senses, his body, and the world around him—but he could not deny his own existence, because he was able to doubt and must exist to manifest that doubt. Even if some "evil genius" were deceiving him, he would have to exist to be deceived. This one sure point provided him with what he called his Archimedean point, in order to further develop his foundation for knowledge. Simply put, Descartes's epistemological justification depended on his indubitable belief in his own existence and his clear and distinct knowledge of God.


title: Epistemology

text: A central issue in epistemology is the question of what the nature of knowledge is or how to define it. Sometimes the expressions "theory of knowledge" and "analysis of knowledge" are used specifically for this form of inquiry. The term "knowledge" has various meanings in natural language. It can refer to an awareness of facts, as in knowing that Mars is a planet, to a possession of skills, as in knowing how to swim, or to an experiential acquaintance, as in knowing Daniel Craig personally. Factual knowledge, also referred to as "propositional knowledge" or "descriptive knowledge", plays a special role in epistemology. On the linguistic level, it is distinguished from the other forms of knowledge since it can be expressed through a that-clause, i.e. using a formulation like "They know that..." followed by the known proposition.


title: Epistemology

text: Some features of factual knowledge are widely accepted: it is a form of cognitive success that establishes epistemic contact with reality. However, there are still various disagreements about its exact nature even though it has been studied intensely. Different factors are responsible for these disagreements. Some theorists try to furnish a practically useful definition by describing its most noteworthy and easily identifiable features. Others engage in an analysis of knowledge, which aims to provide a theoretically precise definition that identifies the set of essential features characteristic for all instances of knowledge and only for them. Differences in the methodology may also cause disagreements. In this regard, some epistemologists use abstract and general intuitions in order to arrive at their definitions. A different approach is to start from concrete individual cases of knowledge to determine what all of them have in common. Yet another method is to focus on linguistic evidence by studying how the term "knowledge" is commonly used. Different standards of knowledge are further sources of disagreement. A few theorists set these standards very high by demanding that absolute certainty or infallibility is necessary. On such a view, knowledge is a very rare thing. Theorists more in tune with ordinary language usually demand lower standards and see knowledge as something commonly found in everyday life.


title: Epistemology

text: The historically most influential definition, discussed since ancient Greek philosophy, characterizes knowledge in relation to three essential features: as (1) a belief that is (2) true and (3) justified. There is still wide acceptance that the first two features are correct, i.e. that knowledge is a mental state that affirms a true proposition. However, there is a lot of dispute about the third feature: justification. This feature is usually included to distinguish knowledge from true beliefs that rest on superstition, lucky guesses, or faulty reasoning. This expresses the idea that knowledge is not the same as being right about something. Traditionally, justification is understood as the possession of evidence: a belief is justified if the believer has good evidence supporting it. Such evidence could be a perceptual experience, a memory, or a second belief.


title: Epistemology

text: The justified-true-belief account of knowledge came under severe criticism in the second half of the 20th century, when Edmund Gettier proposed various counterexamples. In a famous so-called Gettier-case, a person is driving on a country road. There are many barn façades along this road and only one real barn. But it is not possible to tell the difference between them from the road. The person then stops by a fortuitous coincidence in front of the only real barn and forms the belief that it is a barn. The idea behind this thought experiment is that this is not knowledge even though the belief is both justified and true. The reason is that it is just a lucky accident since the person cannot tell the difference: they would have formed exactly the same justified belief if they had stopped at another site, in which case the belief would have been false.


title: Epistemology

text: Various additional examples were proposed along similar lines. Most of them involve a justified true belief that apparently fails to amount to knowledge because the belief's justification is in some sense not relevant to its truth. These counterexamples have provoked very diverse responses. Some theorists think that one only needs to modify one's conception of justification to avoid them. But the more common approach is to search for an additional criterion. On this view, all cases of knowledge involve a justified true belief but some justified true beliefs do not amount to knowledge since they lack this additional feature. There are diverse suggestions for this fourth criterion. Some epistemologists require that no false belief is involved in the justification or that no defeater of the belief is present. A different approach is to require that the belief tracks truth, i.e. that the person would not have the belief if it was false. Some even require that the justification has to be infallible, i.e. that it necessitates the belief's truth.


title: Epistemology

text: A quite different approach is to affirm that the justified-true-belief account of knowledge is deeply flawed and to seek a complete reconceptualization of knowledge. These reconceptualizations often do not require justification at all. One such approach is to require that the true belief was produced by a reliable process. Naturalized epistemologists often hold that the believed fact has to cause the belief. Virtue theorists are also interested in how the belief is produced. For them, the belief must be a manifestation of a cognitive virtue.


title: Epistemology

text: We generally assume that knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief. If so, what is the explanation? A formulation of the value problem in epistemology first occurs in Plato's Meno. Socrates points out to Meno that a man who knew the way to Larissa could lead others there correctly. But so, too, could a man who had true beliefs about how to get there, even if he had not gone there or had any knowledge of Larissa. Socrates says that it seems that both knowledge and true opinion can guide action. Meno then wonders why knowledge is valued more than true belief and why knowledge and true belief are different. Socrates responds that knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief because it is tethered or justified. Justification, or working out the reason for a true belief, locks down true belief.


title: Epistemology

text: The problem is to identify what (if anything) makes knowledge more valuable than mere true belief, or that makes knowledge more valuable than a mere minimal conjunction of its components, such as justification, safety, sensitivity, statistical likelihood, and anti-Gettier conditions, on a particular analysis of knowledge that conceives of knowledge as divided into components (to which knowledge-first epistemological theories, which posit knowledge as fundamental, are notable exceptions). The value problem re-emerged in the philosophical literature on epistemology in the twenty-first century following the rise of virtue epistemology in the 1980s, partly because of the obvious link to the concept of value in ethics.


title: Epistemology

text: In contemporary philosophy, epistemologists including Ernest Sosa, John Greco, Jonathan Kvanvig, Linda Zagzebski, and Duncan Pritchard have defended virtue epistemology as a solution to the value problem. They argue that epistemology should also evaluate the "properties" of people as epistemic agents (i.e. intellectual virtues), rather than merely the properties of propositions and propositional mental attitudes.


title: Epistemology

text: The value problem has been presented as an argument against epistemic reliabilism by Linda Zagzebski, Wayne Riggs, and Richard Swinburne, among others. Zagzebski analogizes the value of knowledge to the value of espresso produced by an espresso maker: "The liquid in this cup is not improved by the fact that it comes from a reliable espresso maker. If the espresso tastes good, it makes no difference if it comes from an unreliable machine." For Zagzebski, the value of knowledge deflates to the value of mere true belief. She assumes that reliability in itself has no value or disvalue, but Goldman and Olsson disagree. They point out that Zagzebski's conclusion rests on the assumption of veritism: all that matters is the acquisition of true belief. To the contrary, they argue that a reliable process for acquiring a true belief adds value to the mere true belief by making it more likely that future beliefs of a similar kind will be true. By analogy, having a reliable espresso maker that produced a good cup of espresso would be more valuable than having an unreliable one that luckily produced a good cup because the reliable one would more likely produce good future cups compared to the unreliable one.


title: Epistemology

text: The value problem is important to assessing the adequacy of theories of knowledge that conceive of knowledge as consisting of true belief and other components. According to Kvanvig, an adequate account of knowledge should resist counterexamples and allow an explanation of the value of knowledge over mere true belief. Should a theory of knowledge fail to do so, it would prove inadequate.


title: Epistemology

text: One of the more influential responses to the problem is that knowledge is not particularly valuable and is not what ought to be the main focus of epistemology. Instead, epistemologists ought to focus on other mental states, such as understanding. Advocates of virtue epistemology have argued that the value of knowledge comes from an internal relationship between the knower and the mental state of believing.


title: Epistemology

text: There are many proposed sources of knowledge and justified belief which we take to be actual sources of knowledge in our everyday lives. Some of the most commonly discussed include perception, reason, memory, and testimony.


title: Epistemology

text: As mentioned above, epistemologists draw a distinction between what can be known "a priori" (independently of experience) and what can only be known "a posteriori" (through experience). Much of what we call "a priori" knowledge is thought to be attained through reason alone, as featured prominently in rationalism. This might also include a non-rational faculty of intuition, as defended by proponents of innatism. In contrast, "a posteriori" knowledge is derived entirely through experience or as a result of experience, as emphasized in empiricism. This also includes cases where knowledge can be traced back to an earlier experience, as in memory or testimony.


title: Epistemology

text: A way to look at the difference between the two is through an example. Bruce Russell gives two propositions in which the reader decides which one he believes more. Option A: All crows are birds. Option B: All crows are black. If you believe option A, then you are a priori justified in believing it because you don't have to see a crow to know it's a bird. If you believe in option B, then you are posteriori justified to believe it because you have seen many crows therefore knowing they are black. He goes on to say that it doesn't matter if the statement is true or not, only that if you believe in one or the other that matters.


title: Epistemology

text: The idea of "a priori" knowledge is that it is based on intuition or rational insights. Laurence BonJour says in his article "The Structure of Empirical Knowledge", that a "rational insight is an immediate, non-inferential grasp, apprehension or 'seeing' that some proposition is necessarily true." (3) Going back to the crow example, by Laurence BonJour's definition the reason you would believe in option A is because you have an immediate knowledge that a crow is a bird, without ever experiencing one.


title: Epistemology

text: Evolutionary psychology takes a novel approach to the problem. It says that there is an innate predisposition for certain types of learning. "Only small parts of the brain resemble a tabula rasa; this is true even for human beings. The remainder is more like an exposed negative waiting to be dipped into a developer fluid".


title: Epistemology

text: Immanuel Kant, in his "Critique of Pure Reason", drew a distinction between "analytic" and "synthetic" propositions. He contended that some propositions are such that we can know they are true just by understanding their meaning. For example, consider, "My father's brother is my uncle." We can know it is true solely by virtue of our understanding in what its terms mean. Philosophers call such propositions "analytic". Synthetic propositions, on the other hand, have distinct subjects and predicates. An example would be, "My father's brother has black hair." Kant stated that all mathematical and scientific statements are analytic priori propositions because they are necessarily true but our knowledge about the attributes of the mathematical or physical subjects we can only get by logical inference.


title: Epistemology

text: While this distinction is first and foremost about meaning and is therefore most relevant to the philosophy of language, the distinction has significant epistemological consequences, seen most prominently in the works of the logical positivists. In particular, if the set of propositions which can only be known "a posteriori" is coextensive with the set of propositions which are synthetically true, and if the set of propositions which can be known "a priori" is coextensive with the set of propositions which are analytically true (or in other words, which are true by definition), then there can only be two kinds of successful inquiry: Logico-mathematical inquiry, which investigates what is true by definition, and empirical inquiry, which investigates what is true in the world. Most notably, this would exclude the possibility that branches of philosophy like metaphysics could ever provide informative accounts of what actually exists.


title: Epistemology

text: The American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine, in his paper "Two Dogmas of Empiricism", famously challenged the analytic-synthetic distinction, arguing that the boundary between the two is too blurry to provide a clear division between propositions that are true by definition and propositions that are not. While some contemporary philosophers take themselves to have offered more sustainable accounts of the distinction that are not vulnerable to Quine's objections, there is no consensus about whether or not these succeed.


title: Epistemology

text: Science is often considered to be a refined, formalized, systematic, institutionalized form of the pursuit and acquisition of empirical knowledge. As such, the philosophy of science may be viewed variously as an application of the principles of epistemology or as a foundation for epistemological inquiry.


title: Epistemology

text: The regress problem (also known as Agrippa's Trilemma) is the problem of providing a complete logical foundation for human knowledge. The traditional way of supporting a rational argument is to appeal to other rational arguments, typically using chains of reason and rules of logic. A classic example that goes back to Aristotle is deducing that "Socrates is mortal". We have a logical rule that says "All humans are mortal" and an assertion that "Socrates is human" and we deduce that "Socrates is mortal". In this example how do we know that Socrates is human? Presumably we apply other rules such as: "All born from human females are human". Which then leaves open the question how do we know that all born from humans are human? This is the regress problem: how can we eventually terminate a logical argument with some statements that do not require further justification but can still be considered rational and justified? As John Pollock stated:


title: Epistemology

text: ... to justify a belief one must appeal to a further justified belief. This means that one of two things can be the case. Either there are some beliefs that we can be justified for holding, without being able to justify them on the basis of any other belief, or else for each justified belief there is an infinite regress of (potential) justification [the nebula theory]. On this theory there is no rock bottom of justification. Justification just meanders in and out through our network of beliefs, stopping nowhere.


title: Epistemology

text: The apparent impossibility of completing an infinite chain of reasoning is thought by some to support skepticism. It is also the impetus for Descartes's famous dictum: "I think, therefore I am". Descartes was looking for some logical statement that could be true without appeal to other statements.


title: Epistemology

text: Many epistemologists studying justification have attempted to argue for various types of chains of reasoning that can escape the regress problem.


title: Epistemology

text: Foundationalists respond to the regress problem by asserting that certain "foundations" or "basic beliefs" support other beliefs but do not themselves require justification from other beliefs. These beliefs might be justified because they are self-evident, infallible, or derive from reliable cognitive mechanisms. Perception, memory, and a priori intuition are often considered possible examples of basic beliefs.


title: Epistemology

text: The chief criticism of foundationalism is that if a belief is not supported by other beliefs, accepting it may be arbitrary or unjustified.


title: Epistemology

text: Another response to the regress problem is coherentism, which is the rejection of the assumption that the regress proceeds according to a pattern of linear justification. To avoid the charge of circularity, coherentists hold that an individual belief is justified circularly by the way it fits together (coheres) with the rest of the belief system of which it is a part. This theory has the advantage of avoiding the infinite regress without claiming special, possibly arbitrary status for some particular class of beliefs. Yet, since a system can be coherent while also being wrong, coherentists face the difficulty of ensuring that the whole system corresponds to reality. Additionally, most logicians agree that any argument that is circular is, at best, only trivially valid. That is, to be illuminating, arguments must operate with information from multiple premises, not simply conclude by reiterating a premise.


title: Epistemology

text: Nigel Warburton writes in "Thinking from A to Z" that "[c]ircular arguments are not invalid; in other words, from a logical point of view there is nothing intrinsically wrong with them. However, they are, when viciously circular, spectacularly uninformative."


title: Epistemology

text: An alternative resolution to the regress problem is known as "infinitism". Infinitists take the infinite series to be merely potential, in the sense that an individual may have indefinitely many reasons available to them, without having consciously thought through all of these reasons when the need arises. This position is motivated in part by the desire to avoid what is seen as the arbitrariness and circularity of its chief competitors, foundationalism and coherentism. The most prominent defense of infinitism has been given by Peter Klein.


title: Epistemology

text: An intermediate position, known as "foundherentism", is advanced by Susan Haack. Foundherentism is meant to unify foundationalism and coherentism. Haack explains the view by using a crossword puzzle as an analogy. Whereas, for example, infinitists regard the regress of reasons as taking the form of a single line that continues indefinitely, Haack has argued that chains of properly justified beliefs look more like a crossword puzzle, with various different lines mutually supporting each other. Thus, Haack's view leaves room for both chains of beliefs that are "vertical" (terminating in foundational beliefs) and chains that are "horizontal" (deriving their justification from coherence with beliefs that are also members of foundationalist chains of belief).


title: Epistemology

text: Empiricism is a view in the theory of knowledge which focuses on the role of experience, especially experience based on perceptual observations by the senses, in the generation of knowledge. Certain forms exempt disciplines such as mathematics and logic from these requirements.


title: Epistemology

text: There are many variants of empiricism, including British empiricism, logical empiricism, phenomenalism, and some versions of common sense philosophy. Most forms of empiricism give epistemologically privileged status to sensory impressions or sense data, although this plays out very differently in different cases. Some of the most famous historical empiricists include John Locke, David Hume, George Berkeley, Francis Bacon, John Stuart Mill, Rudolf Carnap, and Bertrand Russell.


title: Epistemology

text: Rationalism is the epistemological view that reason is the chief source of knowledge and the main determinant of what constitutes knowledge. More broadly, it can also refer to any view which appeals to reason as a source of knowledge or justification. Rationalism is one of the two classical views in epistemology, the other being empiricism. Rationalists claim that the mind, through the use of reason, can directly grasp certain truths in various domains, including logic, mathematics, ethics, and metaphysics. Rationalist views can range from modest views in mathematics and logic (such as that of Gottlob Frege) to ambitious metaphysical systems (such as that of Baruch Spinoza).


title: Epistemology

text: Some of the most famous rationalists include Plato, René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Leibniz.


title: Epistemology

text: Skepticism is a position that questions the possibility of human knowledge, either in particular domains or on a general level. Skepticism does not refer to any one specific school of philosophy, but is rather a thread that runs through many epistemological debates. Ancient Greek skepticism began during the Hellenistic period in philosophy, which featured both Pyrrhonism (notably defended by Pyrrho, Sextus Empiricus, and Aenesidemus) and Academic skepticism (notably defended by Arcesilaus and Carneades). Among ancient Indian philosophers, skepticism was notably defended by the Ajñana school and in the Buddhist Madhyamika tradition. In modern philosophy, René Descartes' famous inquiry into mind and body began as an exercise in skepticism, in which he started by trying to doubt all purported cases of knowledge in order to search for something that was known with absolute certainty.


title: Epistemology

text: Epistemic skepticism questions whether knowledge is possible at all. Generally speaking, skeptics argue that knowledge requires certainty, and that most or all of our beliefs are fallible (meaning that our grounds for holding them always, or almost always, fall short of certainty), which would together entail that knowledge is always or almost always impossible for us. Characterizing knowledge as strong or weak is dependent on a person's viewpoint and their characterization of knowledge. Much of modern epistemology is derived from attempts to better understand and address philosophical skepticism.


title: Epistemology

text: One of the oldest forms of epistemic skepticism can be found in Agrippa's trilemma (named after the Pyrrhonist philosopher Agrippa the Skeptic) which demonstrates that certainty can not be achieved with regard to beliefs. Pyrrhonism dates back to Pyrrho of Elis from the 4th century BCE, although most of what we know about Pyrrhonism today is from the surviving works of Sextus Empiricus. Pyrrhonists claim that for any argument for a non-evident proposition, an equally convincing argument for a contradictory proposition can be produced. Pyrrhonists do not dogmatically deny the possibility of knowledge, but instead point out that beliefs about non-evident matters cannot be substantiated.


title: Epistemology

text: The Cartesian evil demon problem, first raised by René Descartes, supposes that our sensory impressions may be controlled by some external power rather than the result of ordinary veridical perception. In such a scenario, nothing we sense would actually exist, but would instead be mere illusion. As a result, we would never be able to know anything about the world, since we would be systematically deceived about everything. The conclusion often drawn from evil demon skepticism is that even if we are not completely deceived, all of the information provided by our senses is still "compatible" with skeptical scenarios in which we are completely deceived, and that we must therefore either be able to exclude the possibility of deception or else must deny the possibility of "infallible" knowledge (that is, knowledge which is completely certain) beyond our immediate sensory impressions. While the view that no beliefs are beyond doubt other than our immediate sensory impressions is often ascribed to Descartes, he in fact thought that we "can" exclude the possibility that we are systematically deceived, although his reasons for thinking this are based on a highly contentious ontological argument for the existence of a benevolent God who would not allow such deception to occur.


title: Epistemology

text: Epistemological skepticism can be classified as either "mitigated" or "unmitigated" skepticism. Mitigated skepticism rejects "strong" or "strict" knowledge claims but does approve weaker ones, which can be considered "virtual knowledge", but only with regard to justified beliefs. Unmitigated skepticism rejects claims of both virtual and strong knowledge. Characterizing knowledge as strong, weak, virtual or genuine can be determined differently depending on a person's viewpoint as well as their characterization of knowledge. Some of the most notable attempts to respond to unmitigated skepticism include direct realism, disjunctivism, common sense philosophy, pragmatism, fideism, and fictionalism.


title: Epistemology

text: Pragmatism is a fallibilist epistemology that emphasizes the role of action in knowing. Different interpretations of pragmatism variously emphasize: truth as the final outcome of ideal scientific inquiry and experimentation, truth as closely related to usefulness, experience as transacting with instead of representing nature, and human practices as the foundation of language. Pragmatism's origins are often attributed to Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey. In 1878, Peirce formulated the maxim: "Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object."


title: Epistemology

text: William James suggested that through a pragmatist epistemology, theories "become instruments, not answers to enigmas in which we can rest". In James's pragmatic method, which he adapted from Peirce, metaphysical disputes can be settled by tracing the practical consequences of the different sides of the argument. If this process does not resolve the dispute, then "the dispute is idle".


title: Epistemology

text: Contemporary versions of pragmatism have been developed by thinkers such as Richard Rorty and Hilary Putnam. Rorty proposed that values were historically contingent and dependent upon their utility within a given historical period. Contemporary philosophers working in pragmatism are called neopragmatists, and also include Nicholas Rescher, Robert Brandom, Susan Haack, and Cornel West.


title: Epistemology

text: In certain respects an intellectual descendant of pragmatism, naturalized epistemology considers the evolutionary role of knowledge for agents living and evolving in the world. It de-emphasizes the questions around justification and truth, and instead asks, empirically, how reliable beliefs are formed and the role that evolution played in the development of such processes. It suggests a more empirical approach to the subject as a whole, leaving behind philosophical definitions and consistency arguments, and instead using psychological methods to study and understand how "knowledge" is actually formed and is used in the natural world. As such, it does not attempt to answer the analytic questions of traditional epistemology, but rather replace them with new empirical ones.


title: Epistemology

text: Naturalized epistemology was first proposed in "Epistemology Naturalized", a seminal paper by W.V.O. Quine. A less radical view has been defended by Hilary Kornblith in "Knowledge and its Place in Nature", in which he seeks to turn epistemology towards empirical investigation without completely abandoning traditional epistemic concepts.


title: Epistemology

text: Epistemic relativism is the view that what is true, rational, or justified for one person need not be true, rational, or justified for another person. Epistemic relativists therefore assert that while there are "relative" facts about truth, rationality, justification, and so on, there is no "perspective-independent" fact of the matter. Note that this is distinct from epistemic contextualism, which holds that the "meaning" of epistemic terms vary across contexts (e.g. "I know" might mean something different in everyday contexts and skeptical contexts). In contrast, epistemic relativism holds that the relevant "facts" vary, not just linguistic meaning. Relativism about truth may also be a form of ontological relativism, insofar as relativists about truth hold that facts about what "exists" vary based on perspective.


title: Epistemology

text: Constructivism is a view in philosophy according to which all "knowledge is a compilation of human-made constructions", "not the neutral discovery of an objective truth". Whereas objectivism is concerned with the "object of our knowledge", constructivism emphasizes "how we construct knowledge". Constructivism proposes new definitions for knowledge and truth, which emphasize intersubjectivity rather than objectivity, and viability rather than truth. The constructivist point of view is in many ways comparable to certain forms of pragmatism.


title: Epistemology

text: Idealism is a broad term referring to both an ontological view about the world being in some sense mind-dependent and a corresponding epistemological view that everything we know can be reduced to mental phenomena. First and foremost, "idealism" is a metaphysical doctrine. As an epistemological doctrine, idealism shares a great deal with both empiricism and rationalism. Some of the most famous empiricists have been classified as idealists (particularly Berkeley), and yet the subjectivism inherent to idealism also resembles that of Descartes in many respects. Many idealists believe that knowledge is primarily (at least in some areas) acquired by "a priori" processes, or that it is innate—for example, in the form of concepts not derived from experience. The relevant theoretical concepts may purportedly be part of the structure of the human mind (as in Kant's theory of transcendental idealism), or they may be said to exist independently of the mind (as in Plato's theory of Forms).


title: Epistemology

text: Some of the most famous forms of idealism include transcendental idealism (developed by Immanuel Kant), subjective idealism (developed by George Berkeley), and absolute idealism (developed by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Friedrich Schelling).


title: Epistemology

text: Bayesian epistemology is a formal approach to various topics in epistemology that has its roots in Thomas Bayes' work in the field of probability theory. One advantage of its formal method in contrast to traditional epistemology is that its concepts and theorems can be defined with a high degree of precision. It is based on the idea that beliefs can be interpreted as subjective probabilities. As such, they are subject to the laws of probability theory, which act as the norms of rationality. These norms can be divided into static constraints, governing the rationality of beliefs at any moment, and dynamic constraints, governing how rational agents should change their beliefs upon receiving new evidence. The most characteristic Bayesian expression of these principles is found in the form of Dutch books, which illustrate irrationality in agents through a series of bets that lead to a loss for the agent no matter which of the probabilistic events occurs. Bayesians have applied these fundamental principles to various epistemological topics but Bayesianism does not cover all topics of traditional epistemology.


title: Epistemology

text: Feminist epistemology is a subfield of epistemology which applies feminist theory to epistemological questions. It began to emerge as a distinct subfield in the 20th century. Prominent feminist epistemologists include Miranda Fricker (who developed the concept of epistemic injustice), Donna Haraway (who first proposed the concept of situated knowledge), Sandra Harding, and Elizabeth Anderson. Harding proposes that feminist epistemology can be broken into three distinct categories: Feminist empiricism, standpoint epistemology, and postmodern epistemology.


title: Epistemology

text: Feminist epistemology has also played a significant role in the development of many debates in social epistemology.


title: Epistemology

text: Epistemicide is a term used in decolonisation studies that describes the killing of knowledge systems under systemic oppression such as colonisation and slavery. The term was coined by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, who presented the significance of such physical violence creating the centering of Western knowledge in the current world. This term challenges the thought of what is seen as knowledge in academia today.


title: Epistemology

text: Indian schools of philosophy, such as the Hindu Nyaya and Carvaka schools, and the Jain and Buddhist philosophical schools, developed an epistemological tradition independently of the Western philosophical tradition called "pramana". Pramana can be translated as "instrument of knowledge" and refers to various means or sources of knowledge that Indian philosophers held to be reliable. Each school of Indian philosophy had their own theories about which pramanas were valid means to knowledge and which were unreliable (and why). A Vedic text, Taittirīya Āraṇyaka (c. 9th–6th centuries BCE), lists "four means of attaining correct knowledge": "smṛti" ("tradition" or "scripture"), "pratyakṣa" ("perception"), "aitihya" ("communication by one who is expert", or "tradition"), and "anumāna" ("reasoning" or "inference").


title: Epistemology

text: In the Indian traditions, the most widely discussed pramanas are: "Pratyakṣa" (perception), "Anumāṇa" (inference), "Upamāṇa" (comparison and analogy), "Arthāpatti" (postulation, derivation from circumstances), "Anupalabdi" (non-perception, negative/cognitive proof) and "Śabda" (word, testimony of past or present reliable experts). While the Nyaya school (beginning with the Nyāya Sūtras of Gotama, between 6th-century BCE and 2nd-century CE) were a proponent of realism and supported four pramanas (perception, inference, comparison/analogy and testimony), the Buddhist epistemologists (Dignaga and Dharmakirti) generally accepted only perception and inference. The Carvaka school of materialists only accepted the pramana of perception, and hence were among the first empiricists in the Indian traditions. Another school, the Ajñana, included notable proponents of philosophical skepticism.


title: Epistemology

text: The theory of knowledge of the Buddha in the early Buddhist texts has been interpreted as a form of pragmatism as well as a form of correspondence theory. Likewise, the Buddhist philosopher Dharmakirti has been interpreted both as holding a form of pragmatism or correspondence theory for his view that what is true is what has effective power ("arthakriya"). The Buddhist Madhyamika school's theory of emptiness (shunyata) meanwhile has been interpreted as a form of philosophical skepticism.


title: Epistemology

text: The main contribution to epistemology by the Jains has been their theory of "many sided-ness" or "multi-perspectivism" (Anekantavada), which says that since the world is multifaceted, any single viewpoint is limited ("naya" – a partial standpoint). This has been interpreted as a kind of pluralism or perspectivism. According to Jain epistemology, none of the pramanas gives absolute or perfect knowledge since they are each limited points of view.


title: Epistemology

text: Social epistemology deals with questions about knowledge in contexts where our knowledge attributions cannot be explained by simply examining individuals in isolation from one another, meaning that the scope of our knowledge attributions must be widened to include broader social contexts. It also explores the ways in which interpersonal beliefs can be justified in social contexts. The most common topics discussed in contemporary social epistemology are testimony, which deals with the conditions under which a belief "x is true" which resulted from being told "x is true" constitutes knowledge; peer disagreement, which deals with when and how I should revise my beliefs in light of other people holding beliefs that contradict mine; and group epistemology, which deals with what it means to attribute knowledge to groups rather than individuals, and when group knowledge attributions are appropriate.


title: Epistemology

text: Formal epistemology uses formal tools and methods from decision theory, logic, probability theory and computability theory to model and reason about issues of epistemological interest. Work in this area spans several academic fields, including philosophy, computer science, economics, and statistics. The focus of formal epistemology has tended to differ somewhat from that of traditional epistemology, with topics like uncertainty, induction, and belief revision garnering more attention than the analysis of knowledge, skepticism, and issues with justification.


title: Epistemology

text: Metaepistemology is the metaphilosophical study of the methods, aims, and subject matter of epistemology. In general, metaepistemology aims to better understand our first-order epistemological inquiry. Some goals of metaepistemology are identifying inaccurate assumptions made in epistemological debates and determining whether the questions asked in mainline epistemology are the "right" epistemological questions to be asking.


title: West Indies

text: The West Indies is a subregion of North America, surrounded by the North Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea that includes 13 independent island countries and 18 dependencies and other territories in three major archipelagos: the Greater Antilles, the Lesser Antilles, and the Lucayan Archipelago.


title: West Indies

text: The subregion includes all the islands in the Antilles, plus The Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands, which are in the North Atlantic Ocean. Nowadays, the term West Indies is often interchangeable with the term Caribbean, although the latter may also include some Central and South American mainland nations which have Caribbean coastlines, such as Belize, French Guiana, Guyana, and Suriname, as well as the Atlantic island nations of Barbados, Bermuda, and Trinidad and Tobago, all of which are geographically distinct from the three main island groups, but culturally related.


title: West Indies

text: In 1492, Christopher Columbus became the first European to record his arrival at the islands, where he is believed by historians to have first set foot on land in The Bahamas. After the first of the voyages of Christopher Columbus to the Americas, Europeans began to use the term "West Indies" to distinguish this region from both the original ""Indies"" (i.e. India) and the "East Indies" of South Asia and Southeast Asia.


title: West Indies

text: The sport of cricket was popular in most British colonies and during the 1890s, combined West Indies cricket teams began to play international matches. In the 1920s, the West Indies Cricket Board was formed and accorded test status.


title: West Indies

text: [T]he phrase "West Indies" distinguished the territories encountered by Columbus and claimed by Spain from discovery claims by other powers in [Asia's] "East Indies"... The term "West Indies" was eventually used by all European nations to describe their own acquired territories in the continent of America... considering British Caribbean colonies collectively as the "West Indies" had its greatest political importance in the 1950s with the movement to create a federation of those colonies that could ultimately become an independent nation... Despite the collapse of the Federation [in the early 1960s]... the West Indies continues to field a joint cricket team for international competition.


title: West Indies

text: Many cultures were indigenous to these islands, with evidence dating some of them back to the mid-6th millennium BCE.


title: West Indies

text: In the late sixteenth century, French, English and Dutch merchants and privateers began their operations in the Caribbean Sea, attacking Spanish and Portuguese shipping and coastal areas. They often took refuge and refitted their ships in the areas the Spanish could not conquer, including the islands of the Lesser Antilles, the northern coast of South America including the mouth of the Orinoco, and the Atlantic Coast of Central America. In the Lesser Antilles they managed to establish a foothold following the colonisation of St Kitts in 1624 and Barbados in 1626, and when the Sugar Revolution took off in the mid-seventeenth century, they brought in thousands of Africans to work the fields and mills as slave labourers. These Africans wrought a demographic revolution, replacing or joining with either the indigenous Caribs or the European settlers who were there as indentured servants.


title: West Indies

text: The struggle between the northern Europeans and the Spanish spread southward in the mid to late seventeenth century, as English, Dutch, French and Spanish colonists, and in many cases their slaves from Africa first entered and then occupied the coast of The Guianas (which fell to the French, English and Dutch) and the Orinoco valley, which fell to the Spanish. The Dutch, allied with the Caribs of the Orinoco, would eventually carry the struggles deep into South America, first along the Orinoco and then along the northern reaches of the Amazon.


title: West Indies

text: Since no European country had occupied much of Central America, gradually the English of Jamaica established alliances with the Miskito Kingdom of modern-day Nicaragua and Honduras, and then began logging on the coast of modern-day Belize. These interconnected commercial and diplomatic relations made up the Western Caribbean Zone which was in place in the early eighteenth century. In the Miskito Kingdom, the rise to power of the Miskito-Zambos, who originated in the survivors of a rebellion aboard a slave ship in the 1640s and the introduction of African slaves by British settlers within the Miskito area and in Belize, also transformed this area into one with a high percentage of persons of African descent as was found in most of the rest of the Caribbean.


title: West Indies

text: From the 17th through the 19th century, the European colonial territories of the West Indies were the French West Indies, British West Indies, the Danish West Indies, the Netherlands Antilles (Dutch West Indies), and the Spanish West Indies.


title: West Indies

text: In 1916, Denmark sold the Danish West Indies to the United States for US$25 million in gold, per the Treaty of the Danish West Indies. The Danish West Indies became an insular area of the U.S., called the United States Virgin Islands.


title: West Indies

text: Between 1958 and 1962, the United Kingdom re-organised all their West Indies island territories (except the British Virgin Islands and the Bahamas) into the West Indies Federation. They hoped that the Federation would coalesce into a single, independent nation. However, the Federation had limited powers, numerous practical problems, and a lack of popular support; consequently, it was dissolved by the British in 1963, with nine provinces eventually becoming independent sovereign states and four becoming current British Overseas Territories.


title: West Indies

text: "West Indies" or "West India" was a part of the names of several companies of the 17th and 18th centuries, including the Danish West India Company, the Dutch West India Company, the French West India Company, and the Swedish West India Company.


title: West Indies

text: The West Indies are a geologically complex island system consisting of 7,000 islands and islets stretching over 3,000 km from the Florida peninsula of North America south-southeast to the northern coast of Venezuela. These islands include active volcanoes, low-lying atolls, raised limestone islands, and large fragments of continental crust containing tall mountains and insular rivers. Each of the three archipelagos of the West Indies has a unique origin and geologic composition.


title: West Indies

text: The Greater Antilles is geologically the oldest of the three archipelagos and includes both the largest islands (Cuba, Jamaica, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico) and the tallest mountains (Pico Duarte, Blue Mountain, Pic la Selle, Pico Turquino) in the Caribbean. The islands of the Greater Antilles are composed of strata of different geological ages including Precambrian fragmented remains of the North American Plate (older than 539 million years), Jurassic aged limestone (201.3-145 million years ago), as well as island arc deposits and oceanic crust from the Cretaceous (145-66 million years ago).


title: West Indies

text: The Greater Antilles originated near the Isthmian region of present day Central America in the Late Cretaceous (commonly referred to as the Proto-Antilles), then drifted eastward arriving in their current location when colliding with the Bahama Platform of the North American Plate ca. 56 million years ago in the late Paleocene. This collision caused subduction and volcanism in the Proto-Antillean area and likely resulted in continental uplift of the Bahama Platform and changes in sea level. The Greater Antilles have continuously been exposed since the start of the Paleocene or at least since the Middle Eocene (66-40 million years ago), but which areas were above sea level throughout the history of the islands remains unresolved.


title: West Indies

text: The oldest rocks in the Greater Antilles are located in Cuba. They consist of metamorphosed graywacke, argillite, tuff, mafic igneous extrusive flows, and carbonate rock. It is estimated that nearly 70% of Cuba consists of karst limestone. The Blue Mountains of Jamaica are a granite outcrop rising over 2,000 meters, while the rest of the island to the west consists mainly of karst limestone. Much of Hispaniola, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands were formed by the collision of the Caribbean Plate with the North American Plate and consist of 12 island arc terranes. These terranes consist of oceanic crust, volcanic and plutonic rock.


title: West Indies

text: The Lesser Antilles is a volcanic island arc rising along the leading edge of the Caribbean Plate due to the subduction of the Atlantic seafloor of the North American and South American plates. Major islands of the Lesser Antilles likely emerged less than 20 Ma, during the Miocene. The volcanic activity that formed these islands began in the Paleogene, after a period of volcanism in the Greater Antilles ended, and continues today. The main arc of the Lesser Antilles runs north from the coast of Venezuela to the Anegada Passage, a strait separating them from the Greater Antilles, and includes 19 active volcanoes.


title: West Indies

text: The Lucayan Archipelago includes The Bahamas and the Turks and Caicos Islands, a chain of barrier reefs and low islands atop the Bahama Platform. The Bahama Platform is a carbonate block formed of marine sediments and fixed to the North American Plate. The emergent islands of the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos likely formed from accumulated deposits of wind-blown sediments during Pleistocene glacial periods of lower sea level.


title: West Indies

text: N.B.: Territories in "italics" are parts of transregional sovereign states or non-sovereign dependencies.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: On June 14, 2015, sheriff's deputies in Greene County, Missouri, United States, found the body of Clauddine "Dee Dee" Blanchard ("née" Pitre; born May 3, 1967, in Chackbay, Louisiana) face down in the bedroom of her house just outside Springfield, lying on the bed in a pool of blood from stab wounds inflicted several days earlier. There was no sign of her daughter, Gypsy Rose, who, according to Blanchard, had chronic conditions including leukemia, asthma, and muscular dystrophy, and who had the "mental capacity of a 7-year-old due to brain damage" as the result of premature birth.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: After reading troubling Facebook posts earlier in the evening, concerned neighbors notified the police, reporting that Dee Dee might have fallen victim to foul play and that Gypsy Rose, whose wheelchair and medications were still in the house, might have been abducted. The following day, police found Gypsy Rose in Wisconsin, where she had traveled with her boyfriend, Nicholas Godejohn, whom she had met online. When investigators announced that she was actually an adult and did not have any of the physical and mental health issues which her mother claimed she had, public outrage over the possible abduction of a disabled girl gave way to shock and some sympathy for Gypsy Rose.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: Further investigation found that some of the doctors who had examined Gypsy Rose had found no evidence of the claimed disorders. One physician suspected that Dee Dee had Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a mental disorder that causes a parent or other caretaker to exaggerate, fabricate, or induce illness in a person under their care to obtain sympathy or attention. Dee Dee had changed her name after her family, who suspected she had poisoned her stepmother, confronted her about how she treated Gypsy Rose. Nonetheless, many people accepted her situation as true, and the two benefited from the efforts of charities such as Children's Mercy Hospital, Habitat for Humanity, Ronald McDonald House, and the Make-A-Wish Foundation.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: Dee Dee had been making her daughter pass herself off as younger and pretend to be disabled and chronically ill, subjecting her to unnecessary surgery and medication, and controlling her through physical and psychological abuse. Marc Feldman, an international expert on factitious disorders, stated that this was the first case he had experienced in which an abused child killed an abusive parent. Gypsy Rose pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and is serving a 10-year sentence; after a brief trial in November 2018, Godejohn was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: Dee Dee Blanchard was born Clauddine Pitre in Chackbay, Louisiana, near the Gulf Coast in 1967, and grew up with her family in nearby Golden Meadow. Blanchard was one of five children of Claude Anthony Pitre, Sr. and Emma Lois Gisclair.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: Relatives recalled that she had a habit of stealing from her family, which they speculated was a form of retaliation when "things didn't go her way". At some point early in her adult life, she worked as a nurse's aide. The family expressed suspicion that in 1997 she might have killed her own mother by denying her food.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: When she was 24, she became pregnant by Rod Blanchard, then 17. They named their daughter Gypsy Rose because Clauddine liked the name Gypsy and Rod was a fan of Guns N' Roses. Shortly before Gypsy Rose's birth in July 1991, the couple separated when Rod realized he "got married for the wrong reasons". He resisted Clauddine's efforts to get him to return, and she took her newborn daughter to live with her family.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: According to Rod, who remained involved with his daughter at this point, by the time Gypsy was three months old, her mother was convinced that the infant had sleep apnea and began taking her to the hospital where repeated overnight stays with a sleep monitor and other tests found no sign of the condition. Clauddine subsequently became convinced that Gypsy had a wide range of health issues, which she attributed to an unspecified chromosomal disorder. At some point her mother claimed that Gypsy had muscular dystrophy, and made her use a walker.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: Gypsy stated that, when she was 7 or 8, she was riding on her grandfather's motorcycle when they were involved in a minor accident where she obtained an abrasion on her knee. Her mother stated that doctors had given her a wheelchair which she would need to use.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: Gypsy often went with her parents to Special Olympics events. In 2001, when Dee Dee claimed Gypsy was 8 (she was actually 10), she was named the honorary queen of the Krewe of Mid-City, a child-oriented parade held during Mardi Gras in New Orleans.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: Gypsy seems to have stopped going to school after second grade, possibly even as early as kindergarten. Her mother homeschooled her after that, supposedly because her illnesses were so severe; this was later believed to have been an attempt to isolate Gypsy to further her abuse. Gypsy managed to learn to read on her own through the "Harry Potter" books.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: While Gypsy's father Rod had remarried, Clauddine moved in with her father and stepmother. They would later claim that when preparing food for her stepmother, Clauddine would poison it with Roundup weed killer, leading to her own chronic illness during this period. During that time, she was arrested for several minor offenses, including writing bad checks. When the Pitres began to regularly confront her about her treatment of Gypsy and expressed suspicion about her role in her stepmother's health, she left with Gypsy for the New Orleans suburb of Slidell. Her stepmother's health returned to normal shortly afterward.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: In Slidell, she and Gypsy lived in public housing; they paid their bills with Rod's child-support payments and public assistance Clauddine had been granted due to her daughter's supposed medical conditions. They spent most of their time visiting various specialists, mostly at Tulane Medical Center and the Children's Hospital of New Orleans, seeking treatment of the illnesses Clauddine claimed Gypsy had, which she now said included hearing and vision problems. While a muscle biopsy found no sign of the muscular dystrophy Clauddine insisted Gypsy had, she was successful in securing treatment for her daughter's other purported issues. After she told doctors Gypsy had seizures every few months, they prescribed anti-seizure medication. Several surgeries were performed on her during this time and Clauddine regularly took Gypsy to the emergency room for minor ailments.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: After Hurricane Katrina devastated the area in August 2005, Clauddine and Gypsy left their ruined apartment for a shelter in Covington set up for individuals with special needs. Clauddine said Gypsy's medical records, including her birth certificate, had been destroyed in the flooding. A doctor there from the Ozarks suggested they relocate to her native Missouri, and the next month they were airlifted there.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: At first Clauddine and Gypsy lived in a rented home in Aurora, in the southwestern area of the state. During their time there, Gypsy was honored by the Oley Foundation, which advocates for the rights of feeding-tube recipients, as its 2007 Child of the Year. In 2008, Habitat for Humanity built them a small home with a wheelchair ramp and hot tub as part of a larger project on the north side of Springfield, to the east, and the two moved there. The story of a single mother with a severely disabled daughter forced to flee Katrina's devastation received considerable local media attention, and the community often pitched in to help the woman who now went by Clauddinnea Blancharde, and whom they knew as Dee Dee.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: The outpouring of support included many charitable contributions. In Louisiana, mother and daughter had at most availed themselves of occasional stays in Ronald McDonald Houses during medical appointments; in Missouri, they received free flights to see doctors at Children's Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, free trips to Walt Disney World, and backstage passes to Miranda Lambert concerts (where she was frequently photographed with the singer) via the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Rod Blanchard also continued to make monthly child support payments of $1,200, as well as sending Gypsy gifts and occasionally talking to her on the phone (during one call, on her 18th birthday, he recalls Dee Dee telling him not to mention her daughter's real age since "she thinks she's 14").


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: Rod and his second wife regularly hoped to get to Springfield and visit, but for a variety of reasons, Dee Dee would change plans. She told her neighbors in Springfield that Gypsy Rose's father was an abusive drug addict and alcoholic who had never come to terms with his daughter's health issues and never sent them any money.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: nearly-toothless mouth, large glasses and high, childlike voice reinforced the perception that she had all the problems her mother claimed she did. Gypsy often wore wigs or hats to cover her baldness; her mother regularly shaved Gypsy's head to mimic the hairless appearance of a chemotherapy patient, allegedly telling Gypsy that since her medication would eventually cause her hair to fall out, it was best to shave it in advance. When they left the house, Dee Dee often took an oxygen tank and feeding tube with them; Gypsy was fed the children's liquid nutrition supplement PediaSure well into her 20s.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: Dee Dee used physical abuse to control her daughter, always holding her daughter's hand in the presence of others. Whenever Gypsy said something that either suggested she was not genuinely sick or seemed above her purported mental capabilities, Gypsy recalls that her mother would give her hand a very tight squeeze. When the two were alone, Dee Dee would strike her with her open hands or a coat hanger.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: Medical interventions continued; Dee Dee had some of Gypsy's saliva glands treated with Botox, then extracted altogether, to control her drooling, which Gypsy later claimed her mother had induced by using a topical anesthetic to numb her gums before doctor visits.<ref name="20/20 story"></ref> The lack of salivary glands coupled with side-effects of the anti-seizure medication she was given caused Gypsy's already few teeth to decay to the point that the majority of her front teeth were extracted and replaced by a bridge. Tubes were implanted in her ears to control her myriad of purported ear infections.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: Bernardo Flasterstein, a pediatric neurologist who saw Gypsy in Springfield, became suspicious of her muscular dystrophy diagnosis. He ordered MRIs and blood tests, which found no abnormalities. "I don't see any reason why she doesn't walk", he told Dee Dee on a follow-up visit after seeing Gypsy stand and support her own weight. Flasterstein noted that Dee Dee was not a good historian. After contacting Gypsy's doctors in New Orleans, he learned that Gypsy's original muscle biopsy had come back negative, undermining Dee Dee's self-reported diagnosis of muscular dystrophy, as well as her claim that all Gypsy's records had been destroyed by flooding. He suspected the possibility of Munchausen syndrome by proxy. Dee Dee contrived to gain access to Flasterstein's notes and subsequently stopped taking Gypsy to see him.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: Flasterstein did not follow up by reporting Dee Dee to social services. He said he had been told by other doctors to treat the pair with "golden gloves" and doubted the authorities would believe him anyway. In 2009, an anonymous caller told the police about Dee Dee's use of different names and birth dates for herself and her daughter, and suggested Gypsy was in better health than claimed. Officers who performed the resulting wellness check accepted Dee Dee's explanation that she used the misinformation to make it harder for her abusive ex-husband to find her and Gypsy, without talking to Rod, and reported that Gypsy seemed to genuinely be mentally disabled. The file was closed.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: Dee Dee seems to have at least once forged a copy of her daughter's birth certificate, moving her birth date to 1995 to bolster claims that she was still a teenager; Gypsy said in a later interview that for 15 years she was not sure of her real age. She sometimes also claimed that the original had been destroyed during the post-Katrina flooding. Dee Dee did keep another copy with Gypsy's actual birth date. Her daughter recalls seeing it during one of their hospital visits and becoming confused; Dee Dee told her it was a misprint.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: Since 2001, Gypsy had attended science fiction and fantasy conventions, sometimes in costume, since she could blend in, even in her wheelchair. At an event in 2011, she made what may have been an escape attempt that ended when her mother found her in a hotel room with a man she had met online. Again Dee Dee produced the paperwork giving Gypsy's false, younger birth date and threatened to inform the police. Gypsy recalls that afterward, Dee Dee smashed her computer with a hammer and threatened to do the same to her fingers if she ever tried to escape again; she also kept Gypsy leashed and handcuffed to her bed for two weeks. Dee Dee later told Gypsy that she had filed paperwork with the police claiming that Gypsy was mentally incompetent, leading Gypsy to believe that if she attempted to go to the police for help, they would not believe her.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: Sometime around 2012, Gypsy, who continued to use the Internet after her mother had gone to bed to avoid her tightened supervision, made contact online with Nicholas Godejohn, a man around her age from Big Bend, Wisconsin (she said they met on a Christian singles group). Godejohn had a criminal record for indecent exposure and a history of mental illness, sometimes reported as dissociative identity disorder. He also had autism spectrum disorder.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: In 2014, Gypsy confided to 23-year-old neighbor Aleah Woodmansee, (who, unaware that Gypsy was closer to her own age, considered herself a "big sister"), that she and Godejohn had discussed eloping and had even chosen names for potential children. Gypsy, who had five separate Facebook accounts, and Godejohn flirted online, their exchanges sometimes using BDSM elements, which Gypsy has since claimed was more what he was interested in. Woodmansee tried to talk her out of it, still thinking Gypsy was too young and possibly being taken advantage of by an online sexual predator. She considered Gypsy's plans just "fantasies and dreams and nothing like this would ever really take place." Despite Dee Dee's efforts to prevent her from using the Internet, which went as far as destroying her daughter's phone and laptop, Gypsy maintained contact with Godejohn, who saved printouts of her posts, until 2014.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: The next year, Gypsy arranged and also paid for Godejohn to meet her mother in Springfield. Her plan was for him to just casually "bump into" her while she and Dee Dee were at a movie theater, both of them in costume, and apparently strike up a relationship that way, and then later for her to introduce him to her mother. As soon as they did meet in person for the first time, Godejohn says, Gypsy led him to the bathroom, where the two had sex. The two continued their Internet interactions and began developing their plan to kill Dee Dee.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: Godejohn returned to Springfield in June 2015, arriving while Gypsy and her mother were away at a doctor's appointment. After they had returned home and Dee Dee had gone to sleep, he went to the Blanchard house. Gypsy let him in to the home and allegedly gave him duct tape, gloves and a knife with the understanding that he would use it to murder Dee Dee.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: Gypsy hid in the bathroom and covered her ears so that she would not have to hear her mother screaming. Godejohn then stabbed Dee Dee 17 times in her back while she was asleep. Afterwards the two had sex in Gypsy's room, and took $4,000 in cash that Dee Dee had been keeping in the house, mostly from her ex-husband's child support checks. They fled to a motel outside Springfield where they stayed for a few days while planning their next move; during that time, they were seen on security cameras at several local stores. Gypsy said at that point she believed the two had managed to get away with their crime.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: They mailed the murder weapon back to Godejohn's home in Wisconsin to avoid being caught with it, then took a bus there. Several witnesses who saw the pair on their way to the Greyhound station noted that Gypsy wore a blonde wig and walked unassisted.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: After seeing a concerning Facebook status posted from Dee Dee's account, the Blanchards' friends suspected something was not right. When phone calls went unanswered, several of the friends and neighbors went to the house. While the friends/neighbors knew that the two often left on medical trips unannounced, they saw Dee Dee's modified car still in the driveway, making the explanation of an unannounced trip unlikely. Protective film on the windows made it hard to see inside in the low light. No one answered the door, so the gathered friends called 9-1-1. When the police arrived, they had to wait for a search warrant to be issued before they could enter, but they allowed one of the neighbors present to climb through a window, where he saw that the inside of the house was largely undisturbed, and that all of Gypsy's wheelchairs were still present.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: When the warrant was issued, police entered the house and soon found Dee Dee's body. A GoFundMe account was set up to pay for her funeral expenses, and possibly that of Gypsy's. All who knew the Blanchards feared the worst—even if Gypsy had not been harmed, they believed she would be helpless without her wheelchair, medications, and support equipment like the oxygen tanks and feeding tube.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: Woodmansee, who was among those gathered on the Blanchards' lawn, told police what she knew about Gypsy and her secret online boyfriend. She showed them the printouts she had saved, which included his name. Based on that information, police asked Facebook to trace the IP address from which the posts to Dee Dee's account had been made. It turned out to be in Wisconsin, and the next day police agencies in Waukesha County raided the Godejohns' Big Bend home. Both he and Gypsy surrendered and were taken into custody on charges of murder and felony armed criminal action.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: The news that Gypsy was safe was greeted with relief back in Springfield, where she and Godejohn were soon extradited and held on $1 million bond. But, in announcing the news, Greene County sheriff Jim Arnott warned "things are not always what they appear." The media in Springfield soon reported the truth of the Blanchards' lives: that Gypsy had never been sick and had always been able to walk, but her mother had made her pretend otherwise, using physical abuse to control her. Arnott urged people not to donate any money to the family until investigators learned the extent of the fraud.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: After the disclosure of how Dee Dee had treated Gypsy, sympathy for her as the victim of a violent murder rapidly shifted to her daughter as a long-term victim of child abuse. While the charge of first-degree murder can carry the death penalty under Missouri law or life without parole, county prosecutor Dan Patterson soon announced he would not seek it for either Gypsy or Godejohn, calling the case "extraordinary and unusual". After her attorney obtained her medical records from Louisiana, he secured a plea bargain to second-degree murder for Gypsy. Gypsy was so undernourished up to this point, during the year she was in the county jail, her lawyer told "BuzzFeed" that she had gained , in contrast to most of his clients who typically lose weight in that situation. In July 2015, she accepted the plea bargain agreement and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: Godejohn still faced the more severe charge because prosecutors contended that he initiated the murder plot, and both he and Gypsy agreed that he was the one who actually killed Dee Dee. Her plea bargain agreement did not require her to testify against him. In January 2017, his trial was postponed when prosecutors requested a second psychiatric exam; his lawyers contend that he has an intelligence quotient of 82 and is on the autism spectrum, suggesting that he has diminished capacity. He had initially waived his right to a trial by jury, but changed his mind in June of that year.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: In December 2017, the judge set Godejohn's trial for November 2018. In their opening statement, prosecutors alleged that Godejohn had deliberated for over a year before the crime, while his lawyers pointed to his autism and said that Gypsy had formulated the crime and their love-struck client had just done as she had asked. The next day, prosecutors showed jurors the text messages, sometimes sexually explicit, that Gypsy and Godejohn shared in the week before the murder, often using various personas, as well as the knife which he had used to commit the murder. In some of the texts, he asked her for details about Dee Dee's room and sleeping habits. These were supplemented by video of his interview with police after his arrest, where he admitted to having killed her.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: Gypsy testified on the trial's third day. She said that while she had indeed suggested to Godejohn that he kill Dee Dee to end her mother's abuse, she had also considered getting pregnant by him in the hope that once she was carrying Godejohn's child, Dee Dee would have to accept him. Along with the knife that she eventually gave to Godejohn, she stole baby clothes from Walmart during a shopping trip so she could go ahead with either plan. However, she said, Godejohn never told her what he thought about the pregnancy plan.


title: Murder of Dee Dee Blanchard

text: After four days, the case was sent to the jury. Jurors had the option of finding Godejohn guilty of one of three murder charges: involuntary manslaughter, second-degree murder or first-degree murder, or not guilty of any of them. After approximately two hours of deliberation, they returned with the verdict and Godejohn was found guilty of first-degree murder and armed criminal action. In February 2019, he was sentenced to life in prison for the murder conviction, the only possible option since prosecutors had declined to seek the death penalty. Godejohn asked Judge David Jones for leniency on the armed criminal action charge, which carries a minimum sentence of only three years, saying that he had fallen "blindly in love" with Gypsy. He received a sentence of 25 years on that charge, which is concurrent with the life sentence.