Knowability Without Rigidity

The most straightforward interpretation of the principle of knowability is that every true proposition may be known. This, taken together with some intuitively appealing ideas, raises a problem known as the Church–Fitch paradox. There is a wide variety of alternative interpretations of the principle of knowability that have been offered to avoid the paradox. Some of them are based on rigidification of certain aspects of what is knowable. I examine three proposals representing this strategy, those by Edgington, Rückert and Jenkins. Edgington defines what is knowable as a proposition prefixed by the actuality operator. Rückert and Jenkins maintain that what makes a proposition knowable is the possibility of knowing de re (Rückert) or recognizing (Jenkins) the state of affairs that renders the proposition actually true. In both cases, the link to the actual world (or situation) rigidifies what is knowable in some aspect or other. I argue that all three theories have strongly counterintuitive consequences, and I offer an interpretation of the principle of knowability that is both free from rigidity and immune to the Church–Fitch argument.

True lies and Moorean redundancy

According to the subjective view of lying, speakers can lie by asserting a true proposition, as long as they believe this proposition to be false. This view contrasts with the objective view, according to which lying requires the actual falsity of the proposition asserted. The aim of this paper is to draw attention to pairs of assertions that differ only in intuitively redundant content and to show that such pairs of assertions are a reason to favour the subjective view of lying over the objective one.

True lies and Moorean Redundancy

According to the subjective view of lying, speakers can lie by asserting a true proposition, as long as they believe this proposition to be false. This view contrasts with the objective view, according to which lying requires the actual falsity of the proposition asserted. The aim of this paper is to draw attention to pairs of assertions that differ only in intuitively redundant content and to show that such pairs of assertions are a reason to favour the subjective view of lying over the objective one.

Everything is Self-Evident

Plausible probabilistic accounts of evidential support entail that every true proposition is evidence for itself. This paper defends this surprising principle against a series of recent objections from Jessica Brown. Specifically, the paper argues that: (i) explanationist accounts of evidential support convergently entail that every true proposition is self-evident, and (ii) it is often felicitous to cite a true proposition as evidence for itself, just not under that description. The paper also develops an objection involving the apparent impossibility of believing P on the evidential basis of P itself, but gives a reason not to be too worried about this objection. Establishing that every true proposition is self-evident saves probabilistic accounts of evidential support from absurdity, paves the way for a non-sceptical infallibilist theory of knowledge and has distinctive practical consequences.

Gettier Cases, Knowledge and Experimental Inquiry

In 1963, Edmund Gettier published a short paper in the journal Analysis. That paper, entitled “Is Justifi ed True Belief Knowledge?,” purported to demonstrate that even though a person is justified in believing a true proposition p, having that justified true belief (JTB) is not sufficient for the person knowing that p (Gettier, 1963). In particular, Gettier presented examples purporting to show that a person may have a justified true belief, but the belief is, in one way or another, a “lucky belief,” and so the person having the justified true belief that p does not know that p. In what follows, I argue that justified, but luckily true beliefs do count as knowledge. What is important is that there is a limited ability to generalize from such cases, suggesting that many, if not most of what we count as instances of knowledge are, to a greater or lesser extent, localized.

Ignorance and Its Disvalue

It is commonly accepted – not only in the philosophical literature but also in daily life – that ignorance is a failure of some sort. As a result, a desideratum of any ontological account of ignorance is that it must be able to explain why there is something wrong with being ignorant of a true proposition. This article shows two things. First, two influential accounts of ignorance – the Knowledge Account and the True Belief Account – do not satisfy this requirement. They fail to provide a satisfying normative account of the badness of ignorance. Second, this article suggests an alternative explanation of what makes ignorance a bad cognitive state. In a nutshell, ignorance is bad because it is the manifestation of a vice, namely, of what Cassam calls “epistemic insouciance”.

Knowledge Central: A Central Role for Knowledge Attributions in Social Evaluations

Five experiments (N = 1710) demonstrate the central role of knowledge attributions in social evaluations. In Experiments 1–3, we manipulated whether an agent believes, is certain of, or knows a true proposition and asked people to rate whether the agent should perform a variety of actions. We found that knowledge, more so than belief or certainty, leads people to judge that the agent should act. In Experiments 4–5, we investigated whether attributions of knowledge or certainty can explain an important finding on how people act based on statistical evidence, known as “the Wells effect”. We found that knowledge attributions, but not certainty attributions, mediate this effect on decision making.

Epistemic Defeat

Epistemic defeat has to do with the lowering, eliminating, or general downgrading of positive epistemic statuses, especially the statuses of being justified or having knowledge. On most accounts of justification, beliefs can be justified even when the property in virtue of which they are justified does not guarantee their truth. That is, justification is fallible. And for any fallibly justified belief, there is always the possibility that further information could come to light, which would render the belief unjustified once the subject becomes aware of it. When a subject becomes aware of such further information, her justification is defeated, and the defeating information (or her awareness of it) is a defeater. Furthermore, according to standard defeasibility analyses of knowledge, roughly, the existence of defeating information for a subject S’s justification for her belief that p is sufficient to prevent S from having knowledge that p, even while S is unaware of the defeating information and she retains justification for her belief. Note that knowledge is sometimes said to be defeasible, and sometimes it is said to be indefeasible. These characterizations of knowledge are compatible. When knowledge is said to be defeasible, the claim is that the justification required for knowledge is fallible, and possibly subject to defeat: roughly, the point is that it is in general possible that S knows that p on the basis of evidence E even if there are possible worlds in which S possesses E (or, there are possible worlds in which S’s belief that p is justified in the same way as in the actual world), and p is false. And it is therefore possible that the addition of some new evidence E′ to E could reduce or eliminate S’s justification for believing p on the basis of E. The addition of E′ to E would also defeat S’s knowledge that p. By contrast, when knowledge is said to be indefeasible, the claim is that if S knows that p, then there is not any actual further true proposition that would defeat S’s justification for her belief if it were conjoined to her evidence. In other words, to say that S’s knowledge that p is defeasible is to say that S can know that p in the actual world even though there are possible worlds in which there exist further facts that could come to light, which would defeat S’s justification for (and knowledge that) p. To say that S’s knowledge that p is indefeasible is to say that there are no such facts in the actual world. In general, if S knows that p in world W then S’s justification cannot be defeated by any facts that obtain in W. Although most contemporary epistemologists are fallibilists about knowledge, the claim that knowledge is indefeasibly justified true belief is compatible with both fallibilism and infallibilism about knowledge.

Truth, pragmatic theory of

Two distinctly different kinds of theories parade under the banner of the ‘pragmatic theory of truth’. First, there is the consensus theory of C.S. Peirce, according to which a true proposition is one which would be endorsed unanimously by all persons who had had sufficient relevant experiences to judge it. Second, there is the instrumentalist theory associated with William James, John Dewey, and F.C.S. Schiller, according to which a proposition counts as true if and only if behaviour based on a belief in the proposition leads, in the long run and all things considered, to beneficial results for the believers. (Peirce renamed his theory ‘pragmaticism’ when his original term ‘pragmatism’ was appropriated by the instrumentalists.) Unless they are married to some form of ontological anti-realism, which they usually are, both theories imply that the facts of the matter are not relevant to the truth-value of the proposition.

Truth, correspondence theory of

The correspondence theory in its simplest form says that truth is a connection to reality. To be true is to accurately describe – in other words, match, picture, depict, express, conform to, agree with or correspond to – the real world or parts of it. For example, the proposition that a cat is on a mat is true if a real cat is on a real mat. Otherwise, that proposition fails to be true. In general, the truth of a proposition is sensitive to how real things are. In short, truth connects to reality. There are different ways to articulate the connection between true things and the reality they describe. Some theories, for example, treat the connection as a structural relation that ties constituents of a true thing to constituents of the world. Other theories treat the connection as a nonstructural correlation between true things and the world. This difference between structural and correlation theories depends on one’s theories of three components: true things, real things described by the true things, and the correspondence between true things and real things. All versions of the correspondence theory arise from theories of these components. A principle advantage of a correspondence theory is that it accounts for the apparent correlation between the aspects of reality and the truth-value of a proposition. When the cat is on the mat, the proposition that the cat is on the mat is true. If the cat gets off the mat, that proposition is not true. Therefore, a change in the cat correlates with a change in the proposition. Why? The correspondence theory predicts this correlation by analysing truth as a connection to reality. A principle challenge, on the other hand, is to understand the nature of the connection. There are metaphysical and epistemological worries. On the metaphysical side, there is the worry that a correspondence relation is intolerably mysterious. Correspondence is not analysable in terms of familiar physical relations, like distance or force. So what is correspondence? Some philosophers worry that by analysing truth as correspondence you exchange the mystery of truth for a greater mystery. On the epistemology side, there is the worry that you could never know whether a proposition corresponds with things beyond your head, since you can’t get outside your head to see things as they are. The worry here is that you cannot know whether any proposition is true if truth requires correspondence. Another challenge arises from alleged counterexamples. It is true that there are no hobbits. Yet, it is unclear how a true proposition about what is not real could correspond to something that is real. A common response to the challenges involves developing theories of the components involved. For example, there are structural accounts of correspondence designed to remove the metaphysical and epistemological mysteries. Moreover, there are accounts of negative facts, which serve as correspondents for negative truths.