Evaluative Effects on Knowledge Attributions

Abstract

Experimental philosophers have investigated various ways in which non-epistemic evaluations can affect knowledge attributions. For example, several teams of researchers (Beebe and Buckwalter 2010;Beebe and Jensen 2012; Schaffer and Knobe 2012;Beebe and Shea 2013;Buckwalter 2014b;Turri 2014) report that the goodness or badness of an agent's action can affect whether the agent is taken to have certain kinds of knowledge. These findings raise important questions about how patterns of folk knowledge attributions should influence philosophical theorizing about knowledge.The contemporary starting point for philosophical discussions of the nature of knowledge is the justified true belief (or JTB) model. According to this traditional perspective, in order to know something, for example, that water is H 2 O, it must be true that water is H 2 O. This requirement of truth (also known as factivity) specifies that, no matter how firmly you might believe something or how strong your reasons for believing it might be, if it is not true, you cannot know it. In addition to truth, there are also requirements regarding belief and justification. If it is true that water is H 2 O, but you have no reason for thinking that it is, you cannot be said to know it. Even if you could bring yourself to believe that water is H 2 O without having any reason for thinking that it is, and it turned out that your belief was correct, this would not be enough for knowledge. Lucky guesses do not count as knowledge. Furthermore, even if you had reason for thinking that water is H 2 O and if the truth requirement were satisfied, if you did not in fact believe that water is H 2 O, it would not be true that you know that water is H 2 O. Thus, according to the JTB model, each of the justification, truth, and belief conditions is necessary for knowledge, and together they are sufficient.As is well known, the JTB model first came under significant philosophical attack by Edmund Gettier (1963), who used cleverly crafted thought experiments to argue that justification, truth, and belief are not in fact sufficient for knowledge. 2 More recently, mainstream and experimental philosophers have begun to question whether the various components of the JTB model are even necessary. Allan Hazlett (2010Hazlett ( , 2012, for example, has suggested that knowledge without truth

Perspective and Epistemic State Ascriptions

“…Dalbauer andHergovich 2013, Turri 2014 andColaço et al (unpublished); for discussion cf. Buckwalter (2012), Turri (2016), Beebe (2016.…”