Knowledge and Its Limits

Portada
Oxford University Press, 2002 - 340 páginas
The book develops a conception of epistemology in which the notion of knowledge is explanatorily fundamental. It reverses the traditional programme of trying to analyse knowledge as a combination of truth, belief, and other factors, such as justification. Rather, belief is a state whose successful form is knowledge, and justification is on the basis of knowledge, which is acquainted with evidence. Knowing is as much a mental state as believing, but it is world-involving because one can know only what is true; the book extends the externalist conception of mind from the contents of mental states to the attitudes to those contents. As with other mental states, one cannot always know whether one is in the state of knowing. It is argued that this is a special case of a much more general phenomenon; no non-trivial conditions are such that one is always in a position to know that they obtain whenever they in fact do so. This result has disturbing implications for the nature of rationality, because one is not always in a position to know what it is rational to do. Traditional arguments for scepticism fail because they assume that one is always in a position to know what one's evidence is. The speech act of assertion is also governed by a norm of knowledge. A final chapter explores the limits on what can be known that are revealed by the so-called paradox of knowability.
 

Contenido

Introduction
1
Unanalysable knowledge
2
Factive mental states
5
Knowledge as the justification of belief and assertion
8
The myth of epistemic transparency
11
Unknowable truths
18
A State of Mind
21
12 Mental states firstperson accessibility and scepticism
23
76 Sensitivity and broad content
161
Scepticism
164
83 Difference of evidence in good and bad cases
169
84 An argument for sameness of evidence
170
85 The phenomenal conception of evidence
173
86 Sameness of evidence and the sorites
174
87 The nontransparency of rationality
178
88 Scepticism without sameness of evidence
181

13 Knowledge and analysis
27
14 Knowing as the most general factive mental state
33
15 Knowing and believing
41
Broadness
49
22 Broad and narrow conditions
51
23 Mental differences between knowing and believing
54
24 The causal efficacy of knowledge
60
Primeness
65
32 Arguments for primeness
66
33 Free recombination
73
34 The explanatory value of prime conditions
75
35 The value of generality
80
36 Explanation and correlation coefficients
83
37 Primeness and the causal order
88
38 Nonconjunctive decompositions
89
AntiLuminosity
93
42 Luminosity
94
43 An argument against luminosity
96
44 Reliability
98
45 Sorites arguments
102
46 Generalizations
106
47 Scientific tests
109
48 Assertibility conditions
110
Margins and Iterations
114
51 Further iterations
120
53 Close possibilities
123
54 Point estimates
130
55 Iterated interpersonal knowledge
131
An Application
135
61 Conditionally Unexpected Examinations
143
Sensitivity
147
72 Counterfactual sensitivity
148
73 Counterfactuals and scepticism
150
74 Methods
152
75 Contextualist sensitivity
156
Evidence
184
92 Bodies of evidence
186
93 Access to evidence
190
94 An argument
193
95 Evidence as propositional
194
96 Propositional evidence as knowledge
200
97 Knowledge as evidence
203
98 Nonpragmatic justification
207
Evidential Probability
209
102 Uncertain evidence
213
103 Evidence and knowledge
221
104 Epistemic accessibility
224
105 A simple model
228
106 A puzzling phenomenon
230
Assertion
238
112 The truth account
244
113 The knowledge account
249
114 Objections to the knowledge account and replies
255
115 The BK and RBK accounts
260
116 Mathematical assertions
263
117 The point of assertion
266
Structural Unknowability
270
122 Distribution over conjunction
275
123 Quantification into sentence position
285
124 Unanswerable questions
289
125 Transworld knowability
290
Correlation Coefficients
302
Counting Iterations of Knowledge
305
A Formal Model of Slight Insensitivity Almost Everywhere
307
Iterated Probabilities in Epistemic Logic Proofs
311
A NonSymmetric Epistemic Model
316
Distribution over Conjunction
318
Bibliography
321
Index
333
Derechos de autor

Otras ediciones - Ver todas

Términos y frases comunes

Acerca del autor (2002)

Timothy Williamson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh.

Información bibliográfica