Fred Dretske

Frederick Irwin "Fred" Dretske (/ˈdrɛtski/; December 9, 1932 – July 24, 2013) was an American philosopher noted for his contributions to epistemology and the philosophy of mind.

In 1988 he was recruited to Stanford University, where he was the Bella and Eloise Mabury Knapp Professor of Philosophy.

Dretske's next book returned to the topic of knowledge gained via perception but substantially changes the theory.

"[7] Information, understood in Dretske's sense, is something that exists as an objective and mind-independent feature of the natural world and can be quantified.

Dretske's work on belief begins in the last third of Knowledge and the Flow of Information,[10] but the theory changed again in the book that followed, Explaining Behavior (1988).

An important feature of Dretske's account of belief is that, although brain states are recruited to control action because they carry information, there is no guarantee that they will continue to do so.

Representations that get their functions through being recruited by operant conditioning, on the other hand, are beliefs, just as he held in Explaining Behavior.

[16] In addition to the subjects tackled in Dretske's book-length projects, he was also known as a leading proponent, along with David Armstrong and Michael Tooley, of the view that laws of nature are relations among universals.

To combat this attack by the skeptic, Dretske develops relevant alternatives theory (RAT).

RAT holds that an agent need only be able to rule out all relevant alternatives in order to possess knowledge.