Abstract
In discussions of Fitch’s paradox, it is usually assumed without further argument that knowledge is factive, that if a subject knows that p, then p is true. It is argued that this common assumption is not as well-founded as it should be, and that there in fact are certain reasons to be suspicious of the unrestricted version of the factiveness claim. There are two kinds of reason for this suspicion. One is that unrestricted factiveness leads to paradoxes and unexpected results, the other is that the usual arguments for factiveness are not as compelling as is commonly thought. There may in fact be some kinds of contexts, where factiveness doesn’t hold for knowledge—the usual arguments for factiveness don’t suffice to support the claim that knowledge is unrestrictedly factive. Perhaps all that can be shown is that knowledge is at times factive, or that it is default factive, as it were: this doesn’t show that there can’t be counterexamples, however. Certain aspects of knowledge without unrestricted factiveness are examined briefly.
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Notes
A further case would be the Surprise Examination paradox (see Ayer 1973 and Williamson 2000, Chap. 6 for a few discussions). Since the Knower is a concentration of the situation in the Surprise Examination, it is only to be expected that the results in the main text may turn out to be relevant for handling the Surprise Examination. I will not be discussing the Surprise Examination in this paper.
This way of presenting the Knower is in essence that found in Sainsbury, pp. 98ff.
See for instance Sainsbury 1995.
See Brogaard–Salerno, Williamson 2000, Chap. 9, as well as Kvanvig 2006, for useful overviews of the various attempts to handle Fitch.
I owe this point to Joe Salerno (private communication).
For the objection that this move appears to be ad hoc, see below, Sect. 3.1.
Edgington, pp. 558f.
Williamson 2000, Chaps. 4 and 5.
There will also be more on this below, in Sect. Sect. 3.3, when I discuss the dialetheist view. They think that our knowledge is best viewed as a combination of Kp and \(\neg Kp,\) which would appear to have similar consequences.
Steup, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, s.v. “The Analysis of Knowledge”.
Sainsbury, Paradoxes, p. 100.
Lehrer, Theory of Knowledge, London (1990), p. 9.
Williams, Problems of Knowledge, OUP, Oxford, (2001), p. 19.
A bit of nitpicking here. Strictly speaking, to be an oxymoron is weaker than being inconsistent. Oxymorons are combinations that in fact rarely stand for anything, but it is not impossible that there is something that falls under the terms; “dull knife” is one of the standard examples. The gist of the suggestion developed in this paper is quite consistent with holding that false knowledge is an oxymoron; I am only claiming that it may not be inconsistent to be speaking of false knowledge.
Even if there is some empirical evidence for a certain amount of cultural variation, see Weinberg et al. 2001.
See Prior 1960.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for pressing this argument.
See Maudlin (2004), pp. 95ff.
They boil down to this situation because of the nature of the suggested restrictions. There will not be any cases where p is without occurrences of the K operator, since that would just be a first-order truth, for which I have said that factiveness of knowledge holds. The remaining alternative is that p is of the form Kq, in which case we have \(KKq \wedge \neg Kq.\) Here we do get a contradiction if KKϕ → Kϕ is accepted (as the present suggestion does). But in this case, we would need some independent reason for thinking that there really would arise situations where \(KKq \wedge \neg Kq\) would be assertable. None of the above paradoxes gives us such reasons.
Since my suggestion leaves open the possibility that we can know falsehoods, it should in any case not be seen as an unmixed blessing for the antirealist.
Vendler 1972.
Jonathan Kvanvig has a running list of non-factive uses of “knows” at http://www.cassetteradio.com/hazlett/nonfactive.html. There, we can find examples such as “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” (Mark Twain) and “Everything I’ve ever known to be right has proven wrong.” (Bob Dylan, “Nettie Moore,” both presented by Keith DeRose). A case, not on Kvanvig’s list, is: “Worst of all from this point of view are those more uncivilized forms of eating, like licking an ice cream cone—a catlike activity that has been made acceptable in informal America but that still offends those who know eating in public is offensive.” (Leon Kass).
Weinberg et al. (2001) make an empirical case for holding that we perhaps should be careful in putting too much weight on our intuitions about the correct use of “knowledge”.
Another example of an indirect kind of argument is Peacocke’s sophisticated attempt at locating knowledge in a web of other factive concepts, such as perceiving and remembering—see for instance Peacocke 1999, at pp. 51–55. If we give up the factiveness of truth, Peacocke’s attempts to locate knowledge in such a web fails. There is much to be said for—and about—Peacocke’s attempts, and this is not the right place, but it is pretty clear that such a project cannot by itself carry the weight of showing knowledge to be factive; at most, it can proceed from the factiveness of knowledge to some other results, or, if the project succeeds, give some kind of indirect support for factiveness.
See Beall 2000.
See McGee 1985. Nothing much in my argument hangs upon whether McGee is actually right about the cases he discusses (a hotly debated issue); what is important for my argument is the kind of diagnosis McGee gives, and his view of how we arrive at our views concerning conceptual truths.
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Acknowledgements
Research for this paper was supported by a grant from the Swedish Science Council. An ancestor of this paper was presented at Peter Pagin’s Philosophy of language seminar at Stockholm University, and I would like to thank the participants at that seminar for valuable comments. Joe Salerno and an anonymous referee also provided valuable comments on an earlier version.
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Stjernberg, F. Restricting factiveness. Philos Stud 146, 29–48 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9243-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9243-z