Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa
Posted in Philosophy on Mar 10th, 2010
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 [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Feb 25th, 2010
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 [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Feb 23rd, 2010
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 [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Dec 27th, 2009
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 [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Dec 7th, 2009
Here is a draft of a review of Keith DeRose’s new book. Comments welcome.
Posted in Philosophy on Nov 24th, 2009
It’s a little bit natural to think that ‘knows’ contextualism and the shifty kind of invariantist that’s sometimes called an ‘SSI theorist’ or an ‘IRI theorist’ come to a bit of an intuitive draw considering two kinds of third-person knowledge attributions. High Howie has whatever features you think makes it harder to know, or makes [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Nov 23rd, 2009
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 [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Nov 16th, 2009
Timothy Williamson has famously defended these two claims: (1) Knowledge cannot be analyzed (2) Knowledge can play lots of important explanatory roles all over the place These two claims, if true, give us reason to think about the role of knowledge very differently; use it to explain things, instead, of as something we’re trying to [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Oct 25th, 2009
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 [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Oct 24th, 2009
I’m on the record as thinking there are tight connections between counterfactuals and knowledge. Robbie Williams, in his “Defending Conditional Excluded Middle,” denies this. At least, he argues for a strong disconnect between them. Robbie argues, among other things, that there are strong reasons to accept both (A) and (B): (A) If I were to [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Oct 23rd, 2009
Here’s an insanely simple argument for contextualism about knowledge. I think it’s sound, although I’m not sure I’d expect many people to be persuaded by it. I’d be interested in hearing about how readers might think it best to resist it. Here’s premise one. Epistemic modals are intimately connected to knowledge in something like the [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Oct 4th, 2009
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 [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Jul 25th, 2009
In his 2002 paper “Assertion, Knowledge, and Context,” Keith DeRose gave an argument for contextualism about ‘knows’ that took basically this form: knowledge is the norm of assertion; assertability varies according to context; therefore, knowledge varies according to context. This was a pretty confused argument — though of course this is much clearer in retrospect, [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Jun 21st, 2009
Matt Weiner argues that ‘our use of the word “know” is best captured by’ an inconsistent set of inference rules. His setup strikes me as strange. He writes: These are the Knowledge Principles: (Disquotational Principle) An utterance of “S knows that p” at time t is true iff at time t S knows-tenseless that p. [...]
Posted in publications on Jun 20th, 2009
Quantifiers, Knowledge, and Counterfactuals, forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Many of the motivations in favor of contextualism about knowledge apply also to a contextualist approach to counterfactuals. I motivate and articulate such an approach, in terms of the context-sensitive ‘all cases’, in the spirit of David Lewis’s contextualist view about knowledge. The resulting view [...]