There is Some Truth in That

A conversation last night with Yuri and Andy helped me to get clearer on the argument I was trying to press in my last post. Here’s the much more succinct way to make the point. It’s an argument against forms of contextualism that put relevant alternatives into the proposition expressed by knowledge attributions. Suppose I’m [...]

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Suppose you agree with Jonathan Schaffer that ‘knows’ takes an extra argument place, and that variation in what fills this slot explains the context-sensitivity of ‘S-knows-that-p’ attributions. Knowledge relates, say, a subject, a proposition, and, let’s call it, the ‘epistemic standard’. Nothing yet is assumed about what sort of thing that is. Schaffer thinks the epistemic [...]

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One of the questions I’ve been thinking about lately (unrelated to most of my recent blog posts) concerns the best linguistic implementation of contextualism about ‘knows’. I’ve committed myself to contextualism in a couple of papers, but so far I have tried to avoid a commitment to any particular semantic treatment of ‘knows’. I take [...]

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For reasons exactly like the ones outlined in the previous post, these two claims are importantly distinct: (1) If S knows p, then S can appropriately rely on p in practical reasoning. (2) If S knows p, then p is warranted enough to justify S in phi-ing, for any phi. I argued a couple of [...]

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Here’s a crazy thesis that nobody holds: (1) If S knows that p, then S is permitted to assert that p. There are boring counterexamples to (1). For instance, there are cases in which I am morally forbidden from asserting things that I know. This, of course, shows nothing interesting about the relationship between knowledge [...]

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I’m thinking a bit more today about the point I made in a post yesterday about the use of intuitions about cases to evaluate knowledge norms. That point was basically that facts about whether S knows p and whether S is well-enough situated epistemically in order appropriately to X don’t by themselves say anything about [...]

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Here’s a boring thought experiment that doesn’t demonstrate anything. Smith burgled the house last night; Detective Stanley is investigating the crime scene. He acquires evidence sufficient for knowledge that the burglar came in through the window, but finds very little evidence about whether it was Smith or someone else who committed the crime. Here are [...]

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I’ve just uploaded a new draft of my paper on modals and modal epistemology. (I posted an earlier draft a few weeks ago.) If anyone’s interested, it’s here: Modals and Modal Epistemology Comments are extremely welcome. I hope to submit it soon, so if you wanted to provide feedback in the next week or so, [...]

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Pretty much everybody, I think, agrees that some disputes are merely verbal. For example, I may overhear someone say “Derek has big hair,” think of my colleague Derek Ball, and retort, “you’re wrong, Derek has short hair.” If it turns out that my interlocutor was referring not to Derek Ball but to Derek Parfit, then [...]

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A robust and celebrated fact is that imagining that p is often in various respects similar to believing that p. For example, when I imagine, say in the context of engaging with a fiction, that a great injustice has been committed, I feel angry in a way similar to the way I’d feel if I [...]

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According to a common view, beliefs suffer a coherence constraint that desires do not. If I believe that p, then I’m very unlikely, at the very same time, to believe that not-p — and if I do, that’s a clear rational failing. But desiring various contradictory things is commonplace. I don’t want to dispute that [...]

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Let us suppose that Dmitri knows how to sing the ”Il balen” cadenza from Verdi’s Il Trovatore. There’s a debate about whether Dmitri’s knowing how to sing the cadenza amounts to knowing some proposition. According to ‘intellectualists’, knowing how to X just is (to an approximation), knowing, for some w, that w is a way to X. [...]

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Shaun Nichols writes: In addition to a pretense box, Stich and I propose a mechanism that supplies the pretense box with representations that initiate or embellish an episode of pretense, the “Script Elaborator”. This is required to explain the bizarre and creative elements that are evident in much pretend play. However, there are also much [...]

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I’ve just completed a draft of a new paper on modals and modal epistemology, developing some of the ideas in my last few blog posts, and engaging with Timothy Williamson’s discussion of counterfactuals and modal epistemology. Here’s the abstract: Modals and Modal Epistemology Abstract. I distinguish (§§1-2) two projects in modal epistemology, and suggest (§3) [...]

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This post is an exercise in Williamson exegesis. I’m looking primarily at chapter five — the modal epistemology chapter — of The Philosophy of Philosophy. (That chapter substantially overlaps a couple of earlier papers as well.) As many readers will know, Williamson emphasises the equivalence of claims of metaphysical modality with particular counterfactuals (such as the [...]

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