Knowledge and Its LimitsOxford 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 |
333 | |
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