[lit-ideas] Re: Agnotology
- From: jlsperanza@xxxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 20 Apr 2011 18:21:32 -0400
We are discussing:
i. Geary knows that p.
--- entails p.
i. Geary doesn´t that p.
--- implicates (rather) p.
Cfr.
A: I didn´t know you were pregnant!
B: You still don´t.
-------- where B is challenging the implicature, not the entailment.
R. Paul notes:
"Gettier does not so much analyze knowledge as 'justified true
belief' as try to show that it isn't.
<http://alfanos.org/pdfs/04_issues_philo_fall08/07_gettier.pdf>";
Correctly. He claimed that Plato didn´t know what "knowledge" was.
"I'm not sure why JL denies that knowledge is a 'mental state.' What
this denial amounts to is unclear. Belief is often thought of as a
mental state e.g. where it seems to do some work in propositions
like: "Death was surprised to see the servant in the marketplace, for
he believed him to be in Samarra" and "Smith drank Thomson's Tonic
because he believed it would help his liver". Had these beliefs been
absent, Death would not have been surprised, and Smith would not have
drunk the tonic. And so with propositions in which it’s asserted that
A’s knowing that P causes A to do something he might otherwise
not have done. But it really doesn't matter what knowledge is (granting
that Gettier may have shown what it isn't), because we can simply
assume that there's something that makes it true that we have
knowledge, whatever it might be; and if nothing does then this that
talk of knowledge is like talk of the greatest prime number."
--- True. Note that the claim to _ignorance_, unlike the claim to
knowledge, is less subject to the sceptic´s challenge.
By noting on the "state" I was concentrating on "meaning". There is an
important unpublication by Grice (dated 1949, "Disposition and
intention", which he circulated among his colleagues and is now
deposited at the Bancroft Library at the University of California at
Berkeley.
We wouldn´t say,
"I spent last Saturday meaning that an occulist is an eye-doctor."
"I spent last weekend believing it was going to rain."
"I am knowing that p"
----- Whereas for "normal" states, that is the case ("I am drunk" -- "I
am being drunk"). There is something "dispositional" about talk of
"knowledge", "belief," and, of course, Geary´s topic: ignorance.
R. Paul goes on:
"Donal is right. The inference from 'I know that P,' to 'I know that
I know that P,' says nothing about my state of knowledge. And it
seems vacuous: when asked how many things I know if I know that P, it
would be cheating to say that I know uncountably many other things. Can
it really be true that I can extend my knowledge by inserting a
proposition of the form 'I know that P,' into a simple computer
program, and leaving it to expand the brackets for the rest of my
life?´'You know more things as you get older.' Not that way."
Well -- yes. It has more to do with self-deception.
For how can you self-deceive that you don´t know that you know that p?
Similarly for Geary´s case, "I ignore if p"
As Geary notes, "I ignore that the earth is flat" has an odd sound to
it. "We say "whether" the earth is flat."
So, to refute self-deception, we grant that whoever knows (or ignores,
for that matter) that p, he knows (or ignores) that/whether he knows
(or ignores) that/whether p (and so on ad infinitum).
And this should be my last post today!
So it´s, granted, more like a faith in two issues:
incorrigibility ("Who are you to tell me that I don´t know whether I
have a headache?"
privileged access (J. Wisdom, "Other Minds" -- "My mind, I feel, is
closer to _me_ than _other people´s_ minds")
JL S
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