Jody Azzouni
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- October 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780197508817
- eISBN:
- 9780197508848
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780197508817.003.0010
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Metaphysics/Epistemology
Knowledge does not require confidence. An agent may know without confidence because of misleading evidence or for other reasons. An agent may not believe what she knows. Misleading evidence never ...
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Knowledge does not require confidence. An agent may know without confidence because of misleading evidence or for other reasons. An agent may not believe what she knows. Misleading evidence never causes agents to lose knowledge. The vagueness of an expression may be visible to speakers or invisible. In the case of “bald,” it is visible; it is not visible for “know.” This is because knowledge standards are invisible. Vagueness is analyzed as being epistemic in the sense that our ignorance of whether a word applies in a case places no metaphysical constraints on the facts. Agential standards for evidence are also tri-scoped and application-indeterminate. There are cases where such standards determine no answer, knows or not; and there are cases where it is indeterminate whether, or not, standards determine an answer. Because Timothy Williamson’s argument against KK presupposes that knowledge requires confidence, his argument fails.Less
Knowledge does not require confidence. An agent may know without confidence because of misleading evidence or for other reasons. An agent may not believe what she knows. Misleading evidence never causes agents to lose knowledge. The vagueness of an expression may be visible to speakers or invisible. In the case of “bald,” it is visible; it is not visible for “know.” This is because knowledge standards are invisible. Vagueness is analyzed as being epistemic in the sense that our ignorance of whether a word applies in a case places no metaphysical constraints on the facts. Agential standards for evidence are also tri-scoped and application-indeterminate. There are cases where such standards determine no answer, knows or not; and there are cases where it is indeterminate whether, or not, standards determine an answer. Because Timothy Williamson’s argument against KK presupposes that knowledge requires confidence, his argument fails.
Jody Azzouni
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- October 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780197508817
- eISBN:
- 9780197508848
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780197508817.003.0004
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Metaphysics/Epistemology
The usage evidence—various scenarios that realistically depict where and when we attribute knowledge to ourselves and others—shows that all the alternatives (epistemic contextualism, ...
More
The usage evidence—various scenarios that realistically depict where and when we attribute knowledge to ourselves and others—shows that all the alternatives (epistemic contextualism, subject-sensitive invariantism, knowledge relativism) to intellectual invariantism fail. They fail for several reasons: When cases are compared, speaker-hearers tend to retract one or the other conflicting knowledge claim; the intuitions elicited by various cases don’t consistently satisfy any particular position; the situations under which speaker-hearers retract knowledge claims under pressure seem to support an invariantist position. Nevertheless, no standard invariantist position seems supported by the usage data because speaker-hearers do seem to shift because of differences either in the interests of the agents to whom knowledge is attributed, for example, oneself, or because of other apparently non-epistemic reasons. Attempts to use pragmatic tools, such as implicatures, to handle the apparent shifts in knowledge standards are shown to fail as well.Less
The usage evidence—various scenarios that realistically depict where and when we attribute knowledge to ourselves and others—shows that all the alternatives (epistemic contextualism, subject-sensitive invariantism, knowledge relativism) to intellectual invariantism fail. They fail for several reasons: When cases are compared, speaker-hearers tend to retract one or the other conflicting knowledge claim; the intuitions elicited by various cases don’t consistently satisfy any particular position; the situations under which speaker-hearers retract knowledge claims under pressure seem to support an invariantist position. Nevertheless, no standard invariantist position seems supported by the usage data because speaker-hearers do seem to shift because of differences either in the interests of the agents to whom knowledge is attributed, for example, oneself, or because of other apparently non-epistemic reasons. Attempts to use pragmatic tools, such as implicatures, to handle the apparent shifts in knowledge standards are shown to fail as well.
