Marge d’erreur et connaissance de soi

old_uid765
titleMarge d’erreur et connaissance de soi
start_date2006/03/03
schedule11h-13h
onlineno
summaryIn "Knowledge and its Limits" (2000), Timothy Williamson argues that virtually no mental state is luminous, in the sense that there is no non-trivial mental state whose occurrence infallibly entails the knowledge that one is in that state. The argument rests on the idea that the occurrence or non-occurrence of our mental states is a matter of degree, and that our knowledge concerning their occurrence or non-occurrence necessarily involves a margin for error. For instance, to know that I feel cold, my feeling of cold should be sufficiently intense. Conversely, I can very well experience coldness without yet knowing that I feel cold. Williamson's rejection of luminosity is meant to include knowledge. Indeed, if knowing is a mental state, then not even states of knowledge are luminous: I can know something without knowing that I know, thereby defeating the traditional view that knowledge is positively introspective. This claim, however, rests on the controversial assumption that knowledge about one's knowledge is subject to the same kind of margin for error as knowledge about a phenomenal property (such as feeling cold). I will explain how this assumption may be put into question, by presenting a modular account of knowledge, based on the intuition that perceptual knowledge and reflective knowledge do not necessarily involve the same kinds of margin of error. The talk is based on my joint work with Jérôme Dokic, "Margin for Error and the Transparency of Knowledge" and on the second part of my paper "Reliability, Margin for Error and Self-Knowledge" (both of them can be downloaded from the Jean-Nicod archives: http://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/)
oncancelSéance avancée au 24/02/2006
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