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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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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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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Keith DeRose accepts something like the knowledge norm of assertion — although as a contextualist, he can’t have it entirely straightforwardly. He at least thinks this much: the assertability conditions for S for ‘p’ are the same as the truth conditions for ‘I know p’ in S’s mouth. He takes it to be obvious that [...]

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John Hawthorne gives an argument that contextualists about knowledge face considerable pressure to be contextualists about terms that refer to things widely thought to be linked to knowledge, like ‘is epsitemically permitted to assert’ or ‘relies inappropriately upon in one’s practical reasoning’. I’m inclined to agree. He argues, however, that it’s not at all plausible [...]

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In chapter 1 of Knowledge and Lotteries, John Hawthorne introduces the knowledge norm of practical reasoning: “At a rough first pass, one ought only to use that which one knows as a premise in one’s deliberations.” (p.30) He then immediately qualifies this principle in two ways with this footnote (fn.77): Qualification 1: “In a situation [...]

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