But what you've been chasing in this thread is me knowing aliens exist even though they might not. — Srap Tasmaner
p ⊬ □p — Michael
Therefore (b) is true if there is a possible world where John is not a bachelor. — Michael
And if fallibilism is true then knowledge does not require certainty, and so knowledge does not entail certainty. I can know and not be certain. Therefore (c) is true if I am not certain that John is a bachelor. — Michael
I would say knowledge entails certainty. — Andrew M
I would say knowledge entails certainty. — Andrew M
Then knowledge requires certainty. If we are not certain that John is a bachelor then we do not know that John is a bachelor.
The argument I offered was premised on the notion that we can know things even if we are not certain, and so I accept that a rejection of that premise allows one to reject the conclusion.
Whether or not we'd want to reject that premise is another matter, but I see that you are willing. — Michael
A related question, then, is what it takes for us to be certain that something is true. My initial view is that we can only be certain that something is true if that thing is necessarily true, and so I can only be certain that John is a bachelor if it is necessarily true that John is a bachelor, although perhaps that's a matter for another discussion. — Michael
And I again think of the shy schoolboy: I'm inclined to say that he knows the right answer, even if his lack of confidence in himself leads him to doubt that he knows what he does in fact know. — Srap Tasmaner
Even if you're right, certainty is a necessary but not sufficient condition for knowledge. We generally believe that knowledge must be arrived at "in the right way" to count, to rule out lucky guesses. And we seem to have the very same problem with certainty. Many people are certain Trump won the 2020 election, but their certainty was arrived at in the wrong sort of way. If we still have to give an analysis of the right kind of certainty to get anywhere, will that analysis differ significantly from an account of the right way to arrive at knowledge? Maybe, but it's not clear to me. — Srap Tasmaner
... there is generally “a reluctance to allow the contextually set standards for knowledge and certainty to diverge” (Williamson 2000, p. 254). That is, the standards for what counts as knowledge and as certainty typically match one another. Nevertheless, in some contexts we can pull them apart. — SEP - Certainty
To me, it's like someone wobbling on their bike. Do they know how to ride, or are they about to fall off? Compare also a student who can successfully cram for an exam but soon forgets the answers, or who can parrot the right words, to someone who understands the subject and can reliably use and communicate what they know. Having knowledge seems more like the latter to me. — Andrew M
But it's too strict, isn't it? I can ask someone to remember a telephone number for me, and they needn't understand which part is the (American) area code, which the exchange, and so on. They needn't even know it's a telephone number or what a telephone number might be. They either know the digits by heart or they don't. As long as there's no guessing, they know it. They need to be able to recite it back to me, or to reconstruct it if they chose some odd mnemonic, so there's a still an ability-style test, but it's nothing so broad as really "getting" telephones and their numbers. — Srap Tasmaner
We know perfectly well that the sort of person who tends to know stuff, and the sort of procedure that tends to produce knowledge, can fail. (Hence this thread.) And we know just as well that an unreliable person who has an unreliable approach to knowledge is sometimes dead right. We might reasonably prefer the former as an approach to rationality, but we'll miss the boat on what knowledge is. — Srap Tasmaner
Even a stopped clock displays the correct time sometimes, but it isn't connected to the world in an appropriate way. — Andrew M
So in that case we could say that she didn't know that she knew it. But with reflection on her (perhaps repeated) success at remembering it, she could come to know that she knows it. — Andrew M
To relate this back to the OP, knowing everything would also require knowing that one knows in each case. — Andrew M
Knowledge can attach to discrete, one-off events in a way that many things just don't. — Srap Tasmaner
I think, as a general matter, we should preserve both sides of the coin here, not just our fallibility -- the cases where we think we know and we're wrong about that -- but also where we have misplaced doubt, and do know something despite thinking we don't. Even forgetting and remembering has a place here: you can claim, honestly, not to know where Mike is today, and then remember that he has work -- that is, remember that you do know where he is. — Srap Tasmaner
Maybe omniscience can just keep climbing that ladder, knowing that p, knowing that you know it, knowing that you know that you know it, ad nauseam. — Srap Tasmaner
Perhaps it could be tacit. If no doubt is exhibited in the use of knowledge, or the person would respond that they know something if asked, then that would count as knowing that they know. — Andrew M
In the case of the wolf example, the boy can be asked, "How do you know there's a wolf?" Then we can form our own judgment on the evidence. — Andrew M
Someone who always thinks it's 3 o'clock will be right twice a day, but we couldn't say that they know it. — Srap Tasmaner
I'm going to keep mulling over this "situation" business. I've always wanted to say that a key element of knowing is being in a position to know, despite the evident circularity. I might find a way to make that do some work. — Srap Tasmaner
we'd still need to be able to preclude instances like the above, in which certain people would be excluded from counting as knowing things due to the facts about them precluding an appropriate access to reality (in some collection of scenarios). — fdrake
So it turns out the canonical "situation" is not just the environment but involves quite about you, whether you have the capacity to acquire the knowledge available, whether you are receptive to it, and so on. Whether you were paying attention -- that one matters quite a bit. All of that goes into what we can't help but keep calling "being connected to reality the right way" to acquire knowledge. Or we could say that there are ways of interacting with your environment that are knowing ways and ways that aren't. Conducting surveillance is putting yourself in a position to know, and conducting experiments is creating situations where you can be in a position to know. Some of the difficulty of carrying off the acquisition of knowledge is not knowing enough to design those situations; you have only your current capacity to rely on in making the design, and if that's inadequate you might get an interesting result but not know it (the CMB story), or you might force the results to conform to your pre-existing knowledge, misinterpreting rather than simply missing the novelty. — Srap Tasmaner
I don't think the rites themselves can be true or false, only more or less accurate, more or less fit for task — fdrake
You can't 'just know', even if you really truly know. The working needs to be able to be shown. — fdrake
I don't think it's a matter of doubt, just a matter of admitting fallibility. I would say that I know that my housemate is a bachelor, but I also accept that he could be lying to me and have a secret wife that he ran away from. Implausible, perhaps, but not unheard of. Does admitting of this possibility (and not just in the "there is a possible world" sense) somehow entail that I don't know that my housemate is a bachelor (assuming he isn't lying to me)? I don't think so. That I might be mistaken is simply an admission that I am not certain, not an admission of doubt.
So in such a scenario I would say that I know (and perhaps I do), but I'd also say that I might be wrong. Both claims are warranted. — Michael
One might fear that such arguments would prove too much. After all, something is wrong even with the assertion ‘A and I cannot be certain that A’. Does that not suggest that only something more than knowledge warrants assertion? What seems to be at work here is a reluctance to allow the contextually set standards for knowledge and certainty to diverge. Many people are not very happy to say things like ‘She knew that A, but she could not be certain that A’. However, we can to some extent effect such a separation, and then assertibility goes with knowledge, not with the highest possible standards of certainty. For example, one may have warrant to assert ‘A and by Descartes's standards I cannot be absolutely certain that A’, where the reference to Descartes holds those standards apart from the present context. Again, it would often be inappropriate to respond to the assertion ‘A’ by asking ‘How can you be so certain that A?’. The word ‘so’ flags the invocation of unusually high standards of certainty. By ordinary standards you may have had warrant to assert that A even if you could not be so certain that A. — Knowledge and Its Limits, p. 254 - Timothy Williamson
Consider what it would take to be certain that your housemate was a bachelor. If it's never possible, then that's a Cartesian standard, not an ordinary standard. — Andrew M
I agree. Alice can know the phone number qua a ten-digit number. But if when asked she says, "I think it's <number>", then that raises a question as to whether she really does know it. If she gets it right, we're probably inclined to say she did know it after all. However, given her qualification, she wasn't certain that she knew it, and thus not certain what the number was.
So in that case we could say that she didn't know that she knew it. — Andrew M
I do want to say though that I think there's something a little funny going on in imagining judging a sort of canonical case of knowing. (Of the "Well I seen it, didn't I!" variety.) — Srap Tasmaner
But it's evident that we can judge whether a given candidate for a rite is knowledge producing. "You don't find out how many we have in the store by checking the receiving logs; you have to go and count them." What's going on there? I could claim that we are relying on a pre-existing understanding of knowledge to judge whether a rite works -- but it also looks like I'm proposing an alternative rite already known to work. — Srap Tasmaner
One thing I think I'm resisting here is the suggestion (derived from Sellars) that "I know ..." is not really a factual claim at all, but an offer to defend or to justify my claim, to enter the space of reasons. In "I know X because Y," I'm not taking Y as being my justification or my warrant for claiming that X. I'm thinking of X and Y as being more intimately related than that. If I lack one justification, I might have another. You can swap out Y's. Reasons are things you can "come up with". The Y I'm interested in is not something like the basis for an inference, but more like an explication of what sense in which I'm using the word "know". — Srap Tasmaner
Knowledge of this sort is detachable from the reasons supporting it. When questioned, you have to check to see if you kept the original reasons; if you did, you have to reconstruct the inference, and if you didn't then you have to reconstruct the whole thing. Maybe it'll turn out your reasons weren't solid, or your inference was faulty. That happens. But in treating, let's just say it, such a belief as knowledge, you're in a way committed to not needing reasons for it anymore. It's a new save point you can treat as as-far-back-as-I-need-to-go. — Srap Tasmaner
In line with what you're saying, I'd just add that Gilbert Ryle called terms like "see" achievement verbs. To see a wolf entails that there is a wolf there. (Though, of course, one could think they had seen a wolf, but be mistaken.) — Andrew M
One thing that bothers me a little is that the model seems very broadly applicable, which may be a strength, but means we might be missing something specific to knowledge. I think I could read most of what you wrote as applying to, say, rational belief. (And possibly to a great number of other things, ethical questions and so on.) Would you say there's a point in here that is specific to knowledge? — Srap Tasmaner
One thing I've been trying to capture is that there's something a little arbitrary about knowledge. If I know because I was there, even by chance, and you don't because you weren't, that's just the way it is. If I happened to look up and see the balloon before it went behind the trees, I know there was a balloon and you can only take my word for it or not, even if you were walking along beside me. — Srap Tasmaner
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