There is Some Truth in That

I have completed a draft of a new short discussion piece on Michael Blome-Tillmann’s (2009) Mind paper, “Knowledge and Presuppositions”. It is essentially a development of this blog post from a year and a half ago. (I’d forgotten about it, to be honest — I rediscovered it as I finished drafting.) My new paper: Ignorance [...]

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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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In a recent paper in Mind, Michael Blome-Tillmann defends a form of ‘knows’ contextualism that is broadly Lewisean. His project is, in its broad forms, very similar to that in one of my forthcoming papers. In my paper, I argue that Lewis’s particular suggested rules for proper ignoring are inessential to the central contextualist insight, [...]

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I’m going to be discussing an argument that I know Jason Stanley to have given, but I’m away from my copy of his book at the moment, so I can’t cite it properly, or check and see who else has discussed it (or even whether it’s original to Jason). I’ll follow up if citation protocol [...]

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Suppose you think that it’s possible to know that p, even though your epistemic position vis-a-vis p is weak enough for ‘it might be that not-p’, in its epistemic reading, to be true. I don’t really see why you’d want to think this myself, but I guess some people think that (a) this is a [...]

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The idea that knowledge entails certainty is a very intuitive one. It’s easy to forget this, because most of us have it drilled into us, early in our epistemological careers, that embracing a certainty requirement on knowledge leads to skepticism, and we’re rightly convinced that skepticsm is crazy, so we start getting used to the [...]

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What should a contextualist who likes normative principles involving ‘knows’ say? Signing up to the knowledge norms means embracing something typically expressed by sentences fitting something like this schema: (N) Iff S knows p, then S is permitted to phi Some candidates for phi: S believe p; S rely on p in practical reasoning; S [...]

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I’m reading Fantl and McGrath’s new knowledge book. An important thesis of the book is that of Impurism. Impurism is defined in chapter one as the denial of Purism, given thus: (Purism about Knowledge) For any subjects S1 and S2, if S1 and S2 are just alike in their strength of epistemic position with respect to [...]

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Here is a draft of a review of Keith DeRose’s new book. Comments welcome.

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