|
Decomposing knowledge| old_uid | 15039 |
|---|
| title | Decomposing knowledge |
|---|
| start_date | 2015/02/04 |
|---|
| schedule | 14h-16h |
|---|
| online | no |
|---|
| location_info | RdC |
|---|
| summary | It seems uncontroversial that knowledge can not be in general identified to some 'internal' state of the agent to whom knowledge is attributed. This is so because knowledge is factive. To know whether X knows p, we have to know whether p is true, and the truth-value of p is most often completely independent of X's internal epistemic state. In this sense, "externalism" for knowledge appears to be the default assumption. However, a natural idea to consider is that `X knows that p' might be equivalent to 'p and K', where K is a proposition whose truth-value only depends on X's epistemic state. For instance, K could be `X believes that p and has internal justifications for this belief'. Gettier's problem suggests that this specific proposal is not tenable, and Williamson argues that no such K can be found.
In this talk, I will argue that even though we might well be incapable of providing a perfect paraphrase of `X knows that p' as described above, the best theory of natural language must nevertheless assume that the mental lexical entry for the verb 'know', and for factive verbs in general, can be decomposed into a presuppositional part and an assertive part, with a specific consequence in the case of `know'. In the case of "know', the presuppositional part encodes the fact that "know' is factive, and the assertive part would be a non-factive and purely internal attitude. The fact that we cannot paraphrase this non-factive attitude is in itself no more surprising than the fact that many other words cannot be perfectly paraphrased, and is any case irrelevant to the question whether there is an 'internal' attitude corresponding to knowledge (i.e. knowledge minus factivity). The argument will be based on a section of a recent paper that I co-authored with Paul Egré on the interpretation of interrogative clauses when they are arguments of a presuppositional (typically factive) attitude predicate (as in `John knows who came'). We need to assume that the rule whereby such constructions are interpreted must make reference to the `non-presuppositional' part of the relevant attitude verbs. If our account is correct, it follows that the mental lexical entry for `know' includes two components, one of which can be thought of as referring only to the agent's internal mental state. |
|---|
| responsibles | Proust, Égré |
|---|
| |
|