Jonathan Ichikawa's Blog
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 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 p, [...]
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 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, with [...]
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.
(Practical Environment Principle) [...]