Knowledge and Practical Interests

Abstract

The thesis of this book is that whether or not someone knows a proposition at a given time is in part determined by his or her practical interests, i.e., by how much is at stake for that person at that time. Thus, whether a true belief is knowledge is not merely a matter of supporting beliefs or reliability; in the case of knowledge, practical rationality and theoretical rationality are intertwined. This thesis, called Interest-Relative Invariantism about knowledge, is defended against alternative accounts of the phenomena that motivate it, such as the claim that knowledge attributions are linguistically context-sensitive and the claim that the truth of a knowledge claim is somehow relative to the person making the claim. The strategies available for resolving skepticism to the strategies available for resolving other philosophical paradoxes are compared. For example, contextualist solutions to the sorites paradox and the liar paradox, as well as interest-relative accounts of the sorites paradox are considered. It is shown that the argument for the interest-relative character of epistemic notions is not the result of an application of a general strategy for resolving philosophical quandaries, but arises from the distinctive nature of epistemic properties.

Ignorance and Epistemic Contextualism1

“…This fact about the above example provides problems for so-called Subject-Sensitive Invariantist accounts of knowledge. See, for instance, Fantl and McGrath (2002); Hawthorne (2004);Stanley (2005). 4 Cf.…”

Elaboration and intuitions of disagreement

“…Yet, whatever Richard's intended position actually is, it's clear what data he uses to defend his position and this paper is about that data. Hawthorne, 2004;Marques & Garcia-Carpintero, 2014;Schaffer, 2011;Stanley, 2005)). The consensus is based on a recurring objection, which I will call the elaboration objection;…”

Not Knowing a Cat is a Cat: Analyticity and Knowledge Ascriptions

“…26 The Stalnakerian point aligns with Grice's (1989) maxim of quantity.and, to some extent, the maxim of relation. 27 For some defenses of knowledge norms of assertion, see for instance Williamson (1996Williamson ( , 2000, DeRose (2002), Fricker (2006); Hawthorne (2004) and Stanley (2005). For a recent overview of the knowledge norm as well as other weaker norms, see [REFERENCE SUPPRESSED.]…”

“…DeRose 1992; 2009) and subject-sensitive invariantists (e.g. Stanley 2005;Hawthorne 2004) just whose epistemic position should matter for knowledge-ascriptions: the attributor's epistemic position or the epistemic position of the subject of the attribution?…”