Widespread usage data for “know,” “learn,” “see,” “remember,” and other epistemic words are given. Such words are routinely and literally applied to animals ranging from sophisticated elephants and orcas to insects like ants and honeybees to nonconscious mechanisms like driverless cars, drones, and thermostats. Further, “S knows p” places no constraints on the agent S vis-à-vis the concepts exhibited in p: Rover need not have the concept of “cat” to know that a cat is trapped above him in a tree. How this data shows that a knowing agent need not know much, need not be self-conscious of what she knows, and need not be conscious or capable of metacognition is described. The modularity of agential knowledge is characterized: two agents may have the same sensory evidence for p, and yet one can know p while the other doesn’t because of other aspects of their methods for establishing p.
Knowing the Facts: A Contrastivist Account of the Referential Opacity of Knowledge Attributions*
