As a general reply to the entire threat, not just RP's response, may I offer the observation that marriage affects agontology greatly.
Just today, I have had the experience of being asked at least three times if I'm sure *that I know that I know that I *(a) took out the trash, (b) was careful not to spill any yellow paint on the cabinet fronts being re-stained by my wife in the basement, and (c) called the man about the deck repair. Such experiences are probably the most common example of whether just "knowing" or having to "KNOW that you know" are more than just academic exercises.
Robert Paul wrote:
JL quotes Donal "[If] the "I know(1) I know(2)" is meant so that "know" (1) and (2) arethe self-same mental state, ... the expression is redundant (and makes as little sense as 'Please close the door which is the door"and comments I know that p. I know that I know that p.No. It does not relate to the same mental 'state'. Someone may be ignorant of Gettier's analysis of 'knoweldge' as 'justified true belief'------------------------------------------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>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 likeDeath 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.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. Robert Paul Pedantia OR
