Nothing at Stake in Knowledge*

Oxford Studies In Experimental Philosophy, 2020

Sackris and Beebe show that many people seem willing to attribute knowledge in the absence of justification. Their results provide some reason to claim that the folk concept of knowledge does not treat justification as necessary for its deployment. This chapter provides some support for this claim. It does so by addressing an alternative account of Sackris and Beebe’s results—the possibility that the observed knowledge attributions stemmed from protagonist projection, a linguistic phenomenon in which the speaker uses words that the relevant protagonist might use to describe her own situation and the listener interprets the speaker accordingly. That said, caution is recommended. There are alternative possibilities regarding what drives knowledge attributions in cases of unjustified true belief that must be ruled out before much confidence is given to the claim that the folk concept of knowledge does not take justification to be necessary for its use.

In this chapter, we follow Edward Craig's (1990) advice: ask what the concept of knowledge does for us and use our findings as clues about its application conditions. What a concept does for us is a matter of what we can do with it, and what we do with concepts is deploy them in thought and language. So, we will examine the purposes we have in attributing knowledge. This chapter examines two such purposes, agent-evaluation and informant-suggestion, and brings the results to bear on an important debate about the application conditions of the concept of knowledge—the debate between contextualists and their rivals. } The paper responds to arguments from Jessica Brown that there is nothing special about the use of 'knows' to criticize and defend action. Briefly, I respond that by using 'knows that p' in this context we close off a certain sort of objection to one's evaluation of the action -- the "epistemic" objection, according to which the agent doesn't have good enough evidence, strong enough grounds for p. For instance, if I say, "Bob should have taken a left back there, because he knew the restaurant was on Elm Street!," I close off the objection "but Bob didn't have good enough grounds for thinking it was on Elm." Contrast this with criticizing Bob's action by say8ing, "Bob should have taken a left because he had reason to believe it was on Elm Street." This doesn't close off responses of the form "well, he had good reason, but not good enough; he didn't want to take the risk." Such a response isn't always appropriate, but it sometimes is. Using 'knows' closes it off in a way that using 'has reason to believe' doesn't. Using 'knew p' closes it off in a way that merely using 'p' or 'he truly believed that p' doesn't.

Springer eBooks, 2018

Knowing the Facts: a Contrastivist Account of the Referential Opacity of Knowledge Attributions  'I know' is supposed to express a relation, not between me and the sense of a proposition (like 'I believe') but between me and a fact. (Wittgenstein, On Certainty, § 90) Ordinary speakers of English, but also philosophers acting in their professional capacity, often describe agents as 'knowing the facts of the matter', characterise the outcome of our epistemic dealings with the world as 'knowledge of facts', and refer to what has successfully been established by inquiry as the 'known facts'. By using these and other such phrases, they seem to imply that knowledge is, at least in some cases, a relation to facts. However, in epistemological circles the type of knowledge that is canonically ascribed to agents by issuing statements of the form 'S knows that p' goes under the label of 'propositional knowledge'. And, although the qualifier 'propositional' is sometimes used rather innocently as just a way to register the form of such knowledge attributions, the view that propositional knowledge is a relation to propositions is currently taken for granted by many epistemologists. This may be due to the circumstance that the idea that knowledge (from now on I will omit the qualifier 'propositional') is a species of belief has largely survived the demise of the traditional analysis that equates it to justified true belief. For belief is standardly assumed to be a propositional attitude, i.e., a relation to propositions; and if knowledge is just an especially valuable

Synthese Library, 2013

Acta Analytica, 2018

Since Gettier's (1963) seminal work, epistemologists have broadly questioned the validity of the tripartite analyses, arguing that entertaining a justified true belief is sometimes neither sufficient nor necessary for attributing knowledge to a cognitive subject.

Context-Dependence, Perpsective and Relativity (edited by Francois Recanati, Isidora Stojanovic and Neftali Villanueva) de Gruyter Mouton, 2010

The paper is concerned with the semantics of knowledge attributions (K-claims, for short) and proposes a position holding that K-claims are context-sensitive that differs from extant views on the market. First I lay down the data a semantic theory for K-claims needs to explain. Next I present and assess three views purporting to give the semantics for K-claims: contextualism, subject-sensitive invariantism and relativism. All three views are found wanting with respect to their accounting for the data. I then propose a hybrid view according to which the relevant epistemic standards for making/evaluating K-claims are neither those at the context of the subject (subject-sensitive invariantism), nor those at the context of the assessor (relativism), but it is itself an open matter. However, given that we need a principled way of deciding which epistemic standards are the relevant ones, I provide a principle according to which the relevant standards are those that are the highest between those at the context of the subject and those at the context of the assessor/attributor. In the end I consider some objections to the view and offer some answers.

2013

In recent work on the semantics of ‘knowledge’-attributions, a variety of accounts have been proposed that aim to explain the data about speaker intuitions in familiar cases such as DeRose’s Bank Case or Cohen’s Airport Case by means of pragmatic mechanisms, notably Gricean implicatures. This paper argues that pragmatic explanations of the data regarding ‘knowledge’-attributions are unsuccessful and concludes that in explaining those data we have to resort to accounts that (a) take those data at their semantic face value (Epistemic Contextualism, Subject-Sensitive Invariantism or Epistemic Relativism), or (b) reject them on psychological grounds (Moderate Insensitive Invariantism). To establish this conclusion, the paper relies solely upon widely accepted assumptions about pragmatic theory, broadly construed, and on the Stalnakerian insight that linguistic communication takes place against the backdrop of a set of mutually accepted propositions: a conversation’s common ground.

Journal of Memory and Language, 2001

What inferences do readers make about "who knows what" in narrative worlds? We introduce the concepts of projected knowledge and projected co-presence to describe circumstances in which readers infer that characters possess information presented, for example, only in narration. Our experiments examine one type of evidence readers use to project knowledge. In Experiment 1, readers used characters' utterances as evidence to revise their judgments about characters' awareness information presented in the narration. Experiment 2 established that this effect is not due to the presence of just any utterance in the story. Experiment 3 demonstrated differential projection of knowledge for characters depending on whether they were speakers or addressees of the critical utterance. Experiment 4 suggested that readers make these inferences with limited reflection. Experiment 5 demonstrated that readers' judgment times for characters' knowledge is affected by the properties of the projecting utterance. We conclude that individuals are skilled in evaluating textual evidence to project knowledge and co-presence.

Review of Philosophy & Psychology, 2010

In defending his interest-relative account of knowledge in Knowledge and Practical Interests (2005), Jason Stanley relies heavily on intuitions about several bank cases. The cases we focus on are two that are crucial to Stanley’s project: one in which the protagonist does not have practical interest in the truth of the proposition she claims to know (Low Stakes) and one in which the protagonist does have such practical interest (High Stakes). We experimentally test the empirical claims that Stanley seems to make concerning our common-sense intuitions about these cases. Additionally, we test the empirical claims that Jonathan Schaffer (2006) seems to make, regarding the salience of an alternative, in his critique of Stanley. Our data indicate that neither raising the possibility of error nor raising stakes moves people from attributing knowledge to denying it. However, the raising of stakes (but not alternatives) does affect the level of confidence people have in their attributions of knowledge. We argue that our data cast doubt on what both Stanley and Schaffer claim our common-sense judgments about such cases are.