Précis of The Possibility of Knowledge

EPISTEMOLOGY What can we know? And how do we know what we know? These questions are central to the branch of philosophy called epistemology. At its heart are two very important, very interesting questions about being human: how are human beings 'hooked up' to the world? And what 'faculties' do we have that enable us to gain knowledge? In this chapter, we will look at three issues. The first is perception. A quick, common-sense answer of how we are 'hooked up' to the world is this: the world is made up of physical objects that exist outside, and independently of, our minds. We discover this physical world and gain knowledge about it through our senses (vision, hearing, touch, etc.). In other words, we perceive it. But is this right? What is the best account of perception? Does it, in fact, give us knowledge of a physical world that exists independent of our minds? We will see that the common-sense picture gets complicated very quickly. The second part of the chapter steps back from the question of how we know, to ask what knowledge is. We will look at a famous definition of knowledge that was widely accepted from almost the beginnings of philosophy in Plato until 1963, when Edmund Gettier published a paper that showed that the definition was wrong. We will discuss some of the different responses to Gettier's argument. In the third part of chapter, we return to the question of what and how we know. We start again from the

Grazer Philosophische Studien 14, 1981, pp. 97-111.

In this paper I suggest a new account of knowledge by adding a fourth condition to the traditional analysis in terms of justified true belief. I am going to make a first proposal ruling out the Gettier-counterexamples. This proposal will then be corrected in the light of other counterexamples. The final analysis will be a combination of a justified-true-belief-account and a causal account of knowledge.

When a proposition might be the case, for all an agent knows, we can say that the proposition is epistemically possible for the agent. In the standard possible worlds framework, we analyze modal claims using quantification over possible worlds. It is natural to expect that something similar can be done for modal claims involving epistemic possibility. The main aim of this paper is to investigate the prospects of constructing a space of worlds—epistemic space— that allows us to model what is epistemically possible for ordinary, non-ideally rational agents like you and me. I will argue that the prospects look dim for successfully constructing such a space. In turn, this will make a case for the claim that we cannot use the standard possible worlds framework to model what is epistemically possible for ordinary agents.

Dialectica, 2019

Synthese, 2010

Philosophical Studies, 2012

Claims of the form 'I know P and it might be that not-P' tend to sound odd. One natural explanation of this oddity is that the conjuncts are semantically incompatible: in its core epistemic use, 'Might P' is true in a speaker's mouth only if the speaker does not know that not-P. In this paper I defend this view against an alternative proposal that has been advocated by Trent Dougherty and Patrick Rysiew and elaborated upon in Jeremy Fantl and Matthew McGrath's recent Knowledge in an Uncertain World.

2009

This article explains and motivates an account of one way in which we might have substantive a priori knowledge in one important class of domains: domains in which the central concepts are response-dependent. The central example will be our knowledge of the connection between something's being harmful and the fact that it is irrational for us to fail to be averse to that thing. The idea is that although the relevant responses (basic aversion in the case of harm, and a kind of interpretive failure in the case of irrationality) are produced by independent psychological mechanisms, they have distal causes that turn out to be related in ways that -- once language enters the picture -- yield epistemically accessible necessary connections between the referents of their corresponding terms.

Nous, 2018

I foreground the principle of epistemic dependence. I isolate that relation and distinguish it from other relations and note what it does and does not entail. In particular, I distinguish between dependence and necessitation. This has many interesting consequences. On the negative side, many standard arguments in episte-mology are subverted. More positively, once we are liberated from the necessary and sufficient conditions project, many fruitful paths for future epistemological investigation open up. I argue that that not being defeated does not make for knowledge. And I argue for the multiple realization of epistemic properties in non-epistemic properties. If we know something then there is something in virtue of which we know it; and if we are justified in believing something then there is something in virtue of which we are justified in believing it. That much is relatively uncontroversial. Only slightly more controversial is the claim that our having an epistemic achievement, such as knowing something or being justified in believing something, depends on how we are in non-epistemic respects. That is, instantiating epistemic properties depends on our instantiating non-epistemic properties. In this paper, I argue that epistemic/non-epistemic dependence should be given a central place in epistemology, and that doing so has significant consequences. In the first part of this paper, the dependence approach is contrasted with what I shall call " the necessary and sufficient conditions project " the project of attempting to give necessary and sufficient conditions for someone knowing something or being justified in believing something. Although statements of the goal of uncovering necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge or justification are common in the first few pages of epistemology textbooks and articles, I have yet to find an articulation or defense of the project to take as an explicit target. It is usually briefly stated, in passing, as if it were obvious, before moving on. So I will proceed by