Another Blow to Knowledge from Knowledge

2015

OF THE DISSERTATION Knowledge from Knowledge: An Essay on Inferential Knowledge by Rodrigo Martins Borges Dissertation Director: Peter D. Klein Under what conditions do we have inferential knowledge? I propose and defend the following principle: S knows that p via inference only if S knows all the premises essentially involved in her inference in support of p “KFK” for short. Even though KFK is at least tacitly endorsed by many figures in the history of philosophy, from Aristotle through Descartes, and Kant to Bertrand Russell – and, more recently, by David Armstrong – KFK has fallen into disfavor among epistemologists over the past fifty years. In response to Edmund Gettier’s legendary paper, many have proposed views according to which one’s reasoning is a source of knowledge even if one fails to know some or all premises essentially involved in one’s reasoning, while others have given up offering a theory of inferential knowledge and have focused on reasoning as a source of justif...

Forthcoming in Synthese

Plausibly, an inference is an act of coming to believe something on the basis of something else you already believe. But what is it to believe something on the basis of something else? I propose an account of inference on which the answer to this question is disjunctive: to believe something on the basis of something else you already believe is either for your premise-beliefs to rationally cause your conclusion-belief—that is, on the view proposed: for the former to cause the latter in a way that is either actually or potentially productive of knowledge—or for your premise-beliefs to cause your conclusion-belief “deviantly,” but for you mistakenly (though rationally) to believe that the former have caused the latter rationally. This view, I argue, has many of the benefits of views that make appeal to what has been called “the Taking Condition,” but it avoids some of the most pressing objections to those views. The result is both a theoretically satisfying account of the act of inferring and a demonstration of the power of a knowledge-first approach to the philosophy of mind.

This paper argues that three plausible principles are mutually inconsistent: (KA) One ought to assert only what one knows; (AP) If it is proper to assert some proposition q, then it is, barring special and not very common circumstances, proper to assert any proposition p from which q has been competently inferred; (AKN) Some propositions are both properly assertible and known by competent inference from propositions which one does not know. Each pair of two principles constitute an argument against the remaining principle. But which principle should one drop?

Philosophical Writings, 2014

It is largely admitted that the tripartite conception as Justified True Belief knowledge implying truth is possible but truth is not recognisable per se, that is, knowledge implying self-awareness of having the truth (which is not to be conflated with certainty) is impossible. Borrowing from the theory of meaning I intend to redefine knowledge with the immanence principle and the implicitness principle, which impose the recognisability of the knowledge conditions. Second, I argue that since truth is not directly recognisable it must be inferred. Hence, knowledge is the product of an inference from a belief and a justification to the truthascription of the henceforth-acknowledged belief. The seminal Gettier problems take thus an almost trivial aspect, or at least it is no obstacle to the possibility of knowledge thus defined.

Philosophia, 1982

D. Walton, Philosophia, 34, 2006, 355-376.

In this paper, I begin by examining some common cases of the argumentum ad ignorantiam. I then proceed to try to explicate how lack of knowledge reasoning could be defined by examining currents standards for defining knowledge in logic, and by formulating four axioms of knowledge commonly found in current systems of epistemic logic that fit the current view.

Veritas (Porto Alegre), 2017

The knowledge from falsehood (KFF) advocates present us with putative examples of inferential knowledge in which a subject S apparently acquires knowledge by competently inferring it from a falsehood. If they are right, then we will have to face some major problems for the epistemology of reasoning. However, in this paper, I will argue that there is no knowledge from falsehood (KFF), that the cases presented by KFF advocates are not cases of genuine inferential knowledge at all, and that the intuitive reaction to attribute knowledge to the subject in such cases has no relation with the falsehood. My opposition to KFF will be directed to the KFF account put forward by Peter Klein in his paper "Useful False Beliefs" (2008). In particular, I show that Klein's account fails because (i) it is unable to describe how the falsehood can inferentially provide a positive epistemic status to the inferred belief in order to upgrade it to knowledge; and (ii) it is incompatible with a tacit and widespread notion of inference.

Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy

Recently, a number of cases have been proposed which seem to show that − contrary to widely held opinion − a subject can inferentially come to know some proposition p from an inference which relies on a false belief q which is essential. The standard response to these cases is to insist that there is really an additional true belief in the vicinity, making the false belief inessential. I present a new kind of case suggesting that a subject can inferentially come to know a proposition from an essential false belief where no truth in the vicinity seems to be present.

Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (Hardback), 2012

Episteme, 2014

According to the principle of Knowledge Counter-Closure (KCC), knowledge-yielding single-premise deduction requires aknownpremise: if S believes q solely on the basis of deduction from p, and S knows q, then S must know p. Althoughprima facieplausible, widely accepted, and supported by seemingly compelling motivations, KCC has recently been challenged by cases where S arguably knows q solely on the basis of deduction from p, yet p is false (Warfield 2005; Fitelson 2010) or p is true but not known (Coffman 2008; Luzzi 2010). I explore a view that resolves this tension by abandoning KCC in the light of these challenges, and which acknowledges their force but also their limits. Adopting this view helps identify the epistemic constraints that operate on the premises of knowledge-yielding deduction, clarifies the epistemic role of deduction, and allows us to distil the kernel of truth in the motivations that are standardly taken to support KCC.