Blogosophy

Puzzling Knowledge and Knowing Puzzles

Puzzling Knowledge and Knowing Puzzles

It's late, but I've just reread Brian Weatherson's Puzzle About Knowledge, and I finally think I understand what he's driving at as far as knowledge being true belief, not warranted true belief. It's the stress that is sometimes placed on the word know that seems to be puzzling him (stressing "know" changes the acceptibility of claims about knowledge), and he intuits that the unstressed version (where, for instance, you can get away with saying that nine people know they have a virus even though four of them believe they have a virus for the wrong reasons) is closer to the semantic meaning, so most of the time when people say "know" they intend nothing more than believe something that happens to be true, regardless of their reasons for believing it. My intuition says the opposite: almost all the time people intend "know" to mean justified true belief, but the fact that pragmatically true belief is good enough most of the time allows it to piggy-back on the intended meaning; what people are doing when they stress know, IMO, is emphasizing that they don't intend to allow this common bit of sloppiness. For instance, in Brian's example if the boss asks does Molly know she has the virus, what do you think his reaction would be if you replied "Yes, because she says her horoscope told her so." I think that's just as likely to provoke a "Whaddaya mean she knows she has it?" as Brian's scenario is to provoke a "Whaddaya mean she doesn't know she has it?" and it will do little good to point out that she does have it, she believes she has it, and for the most part that's all there is to knowing. The point is that as soon as you start relying on the difference between true belief and justified true belief, by attributing knowledge where people have the former but not the latter, you invite confusion, and it's not just late 20th century epistemology that causes it. Posted by joshua at July 17, 2003 10:33 PM