Philosophy Colloquium - Seth Yalcin / Counterepistemic knowledge
Philosophy Colloquium - Seth Yalcin / Counterepistemic knowledge
March 27, Seth Yalcin joins us from Berkeley to present his work in philosophy of language and epistemology at the Philosophy Department colloquium.
Some of our conditional knowledge is counterepistemic: knowledge of an indicative conditional whose antecedent is false. Counterepistemic knowledge ascriptions give rise to puzzles, including what appear to be systematic violations of factivity. I critically examine “propositionalist" explanations, including contextualist and descriptivist accounts, and argue that they ultimately fail to make sense of the facts. In their place, I explore a non-propositional theory extending ideas from the literatures on belief revision and on conversational update to knowledge. On the positive account, counterepistemic knowledge is not reducible to knowledge of propositions, and knowledge states are more than relations to facts known.