There is Some Truth in That

I was very pleased to have my short discussion on evaluating the knowledge norm of practical reasoning appear in the inaugural issue of Thought. Unfortunately, I’ve just noticed that there are two errors near the end of the published version of the paper. One, which is entirely my fault, is that I misspelled Mikkel Gerken’s [...]

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There’s a philosophy of mind reading group at UBC, reading Dretske’s (1981) Knowledge and the Flow of Information this spring. I’ve never made a proper study of Dretske’s work before, so I’m finding it extremely useful and interesting. In yesterday’s reading group, I had an idea that I’d like to explore a bit further; consider this [...]

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Knowledge shows up in theories a lot lately. Or should I say that ‘knowledge’ shows up in statements of theories? One question I’m hoping to research a fair amount in the near future concerns the status of theoretical claims about knowledge. The knowledge first program, broadly construed, says that knowledge has some kind of priority [...]

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I’ve been sitting in on, and enjoying, Carrie Jenkins’s grad seminar in epistemology. Today, one of our grad students, Kousaku Yui, brought up a pretty interesting suggestion in response to Jason Stanley’s stakes-relative approach to knowledge. I didn’t recognize the point as one that I’ve seen discussed before — if there is a literature on it, [...]

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I’m re-reading Timothy Williamson’s Knowledge and Its Limits for a reading group at UBC. I’m struck by this passage, from the introduction to Chapter 9 on Evidence. [W]e may speculate that standard accounts of justification have failed to deal convincingly with the traditional problem the regress of justifications—what justifies the justifiers?—because they have forbidden themselves to [...]

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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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