Abstract
To know that p it is not enough to be sure that p and happen to be right. One’s confidence must be justified and that justification must be disinterested.
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Notes
Harrison (1962) gives a sound critique of the performative treatment of ‘I know that p’.
For argument that there is see Bennett (1964). For what looks to me like an effective effort to describe what would be counter-examples see Kirk (1967).
Malcolm (1952a) has suggested, I think rightly, that the denial that it is logically possible to know such propositions is either necessarily false or else fails to use `know’ to express the concept that it is ordinarily used to express.
As Malcolm (1950) has effectively pointed out.
Cf. Prichard’s (1950) well-known remark (p. 88) that “whenever we know something we either do, or at least can, by reflecting, directly know that we are knowing it…”
That it is not impossible has been argued by Kyburg (1965 and 1970 ). That it is impossible has been argued by Hintikka and Hilpinen (1965), by Hilpinen (1968), by Swain (1970a), and by Lehrer (1970).
This example, often referred to as “the lottery paradox,” was suggested by Kyburg (1965).
Descartes, in his discussion of Rules VI, VII, and XI of his Rules for the Direction of the Mind,finds important the difference between deduction that depends on memory and deduction that the understanding is “able to apprehend as a whole and all at once”; he affirms that to approach nearer the latter sort of deduction (through the rapidity and uninterruptedness of the mind’s movement through the whole deduction, so that it becomes less clear that there is dependence on memory) “affords a more certain knowledge of the conclusion we have in view”. (Kemp-Smith (1957), pp. 52–53).
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© 1975 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Ginet, C. (1975). The General Conditions of Knowledge: Justification. In: Knowledge, Perception and Memory. Philosophical Studies Series in Philosophy, vol 5. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9451-1_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-9451-1_3
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