Weblog: There is Some Truth in That

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 [...]

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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 assert p. [...]

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I know that there is snow outside; this knowledge is based in part on my visual experience. When I look out the window, I have experiences that partially constitute seeing snow. I also know that squares have four sides. Arguably, this knowledge is independent of experience, depending only on my conceptual competence, or rational capacities, [...]

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A priori justification or knowledge is meant to be independent from experience in some sense. But it’s a bit tricky to explain just what that sense is. It’s usually allowed that there are some roles for experience that are merely enabling in a way that is consistent with apriority. For example, maybe you think particular [...]

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