Attributing Knowledge : What It Means to Know Something

The word “know” is revealed as vague, applicable to fallible agents, factive, and criterion-transcendent. It is invariant in its meaning across contexts and invariant relative to different agents. Only purely epistemic properties affect its correct application—not the interests of agents or those who attribute the word to agents. These properties enable “know” to be applied correctly—as it routinely is—to cognitive agents ranging from sophisticated human knowers, who engage in substantial metacognition, to various animals, who know much less and do much less, if any, metacognition, to nonconscious mechanical devices such as drones, robots, and the like. These properties of the word “know” suffice to explain the usage phenomena that contextualists and subject-sensitive invariantists invoke to place pressure on an understanding of the word that treats its application as involving no interests of agents, or others. It is also shown that the factivity and the fallibilist-compatibility of the word “know” explain Moorean paradoxes, the preface paradox, and the lottery paradox. A fallibility-sensitive failure of knowledge closure is given along with a similar failure of rational-belief closure. The latter explains why rational agents can nevertheless believe A and B, where A and B contradict each other. A substantial discussion of various kinds of metacognition is given—as well as a discussion of the metacognition literature in cognitive ethology. An appendix offers a new resolution of the hangman paradox, one that turns neither on a failure of knowledge closure nor on a failure of KK. In Attributing Knowledge , Jody Azzouni challenges philosophical conventions about what it means to know something. He argues that the restrictive conditions philosophers place on knowers only hold in special cases; knowledge can be attributed to babies, sophisticated animals (great apes, orcas), unsophisticated animals (bees), and machinery (drones, driverless cars). Azzouni also gives a fresh defense of fallibilism. Relying on lexical semantics and ordinary usage, he shows that there are no knowledge norms for assertion or action. He examines everyday cases of knowledge challenge and attribution to show many recent and popular epistemological positions are wrong. By providing a long-sought intelligible characterization of knowledge attribution, Azzouni explains why the concept has puzzled philosophers so long, and he solves longstanding and recent puzzles that have perplexed epistemologists--including the dogmatism paradox, Gettier puzzles, and the surprise-exam paradox. "This is a terrific book, full of surprises. For instance, Chapter 9 is full of points that are original, insightful, and useful in helping to resolve stale debates. I especially liked the points that we don't ordinarily describe someone as losing knowledge by gaining defeating evidence, that "knows" is vague and tri-scoped, that vagueness needn't be explained by appeal to precise metasemantic machinery, and that Williamson's anti-luminosity argument founders on the fact that knowledge doesn't require confidence. Bravo!" --Ram Neta, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Praise for Jody Azzouni's Ontology without Borders : "Azzouni offers a very strong drink, proposing that we do without central elements of what almost anyone would call logic or ontology. His arguments are serious and wide-ranging. If he's right, the reader will have learned something very important. If he's wrong, then the reader who figures out how he went wrong will also have learned something very important. Not every book has this feature." --Michael Gorman, The Catholic University of America "The word "know" is revealed as vague, applicable to fallible agents, factive and criterion transcendent. It is invariant in its meaning across contexts and invariant relative to different agents. Only purely epistemic properties affect its correct application-not the interests of agents or those who attribute the word to agents. These properties enable "know" to be applied correctly-as it routinely is-to cognitive agents ranging from sophisticated human knowers, who engage in substantial metacognition, to various animals, who know much less and do much less, if any, metacognition, to nonconscious mechanical devices such as drones, robots, and the like. These properties of the word "know" suffice to explain the usage phenomena that contextualists and subject-sensitive invariantists invoke to place pressure on an understanding of the word that treats its application as involving no interests of agents, or others. It is also shown the factivity and the fallibilist-compatibility of the word "know" explains Moorean paradoxes, the preface paradox, and the lottery paradox. A fallibility-sensitive failure of knowledge-closure is given along with a similar failure of rational-belief closure. The latter explains why rational agents can nevertheless believe A and B, where A and B contradict one another. A substantial discussion of various kinds of metacognition is given-as well as a discussion of the metacognition literature in cognitive ethology. An appendix offers a new resolution of the hangman paradox, one that turns neither on a failure of knowledge closure nor on a failure of KK" -- University Press Scholarship Online "The word "know" is revealed as vague, applicable to fallible agents, factive and criterion transcendent. It is invariant in its meaning across contexts and invariant relative to different agents. Only purely epistemic properties affect its correct application-not the interests of agents or those who attribute the word to agents. These properties enable "know" to be applied correctly-as it routinely is-to cognitive agents ranging from sophisticated human knowers, who engage in substantial metacognition, to various animals, who know much less and do much less, if any, metacognition, to nonconscious mechanical devices such as drones, robots, and the like. These properties of the word "know" suffice to explain the usage phenomena that contextualists and subject-sensitive invariantists invoke to place pressure on an understanding of the word that treats its application as involving no interests of agents, or others. It is also shown the factivity and the fallibilist-compatibility of the word "know" explains Moorean paradoxes, the preface paradox, and the lottery paradox. A fallibility-sensitive failure of knowledge-closure is given along with a similar failure of rational-belief closure. The latter explains why rational agents can nevertheless believe A and B, where A and B contradict one another. A substantial discussion of various kinds of metacognition is given-as well as a discussion of the metacognition literature in cognitive ethology. An appendix offers a new resolution of the hangman paradox, one that turns neither on a failure of knowledge closure nor on a failure of KK"-- Provided by publisher Cover Title Pages.pdf Dedication.pdf Epigraph.pdf Contents Acknowledgments.pdf Introduction.pdf 1.Knowledge Attributions to Minimal Epistemic Agents.pdf 2.Knowledge and Knowing that p; “Knowledge” and “Knowing that p”.pdf 3.The Variability of Know(s)-that Judgments.pdf 4.Assertion Norms.pdf 5.Usage Traps in the Language of Iterated Knowledge Attributions.pdf 6.Iterated and Ground-Floor Cognition, KK and K¬K Arguments and Empirical Studies.pdf 7.Inferential Justification.pdf 8.Representational Justification and Challenges to “the Given”.pdf 9.Confidence, Belief, and Knowledge; The Vagueness of “Know(s)”.pdf 10.Usage Challenges to Fallibilism.pdf 11.The (Complex) Structure of the Meaning of “Know(s)”.pdf Conclusion.pdf Appendix-The Aesthetics of Hangman Knots.pdf Bibliography.pdf Index.pdf In this text, Jody Azzouni challenges existing epistemological conventions about knowledge: what it means to know something, who or what is seen as knowing, and how we talk about it. He argues that the classic restrictive conditions philosophers routinely place on knowers only hold in special cases, and suggests that knowledge can be equally attributed to children, sophisticated animals (great apes, orcas), unsophisticated animals (bees), and machinery or devices (driverless cars). Through this perspective and a close examination of its relation to linguistics and psychology, Azzouni freshly approaches longstanding epistemological puzzles including the dogmatism paradox, Gettier puzzles, Agrippa's trilemma, and the surprise-exam paradox