Elusive There
Posted in Philosophy on Oct 26th, 2009
Elusive There. Try to go there, and straightaway it disappears. That is how walking destroys there.
Monthly Archive for October, 2009
Hawthorne against contextualist ‘inappropriate’
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 [...]
Counterfactuals and Knowledge
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 flip a [...]
Epistemic Modals and Contextualism
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 following [...]
Knowledge norm of practical reasoning
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 where [...]