Week 11

Exams

Administrative notes about marking

Thoughts on reading your second marked essays

Advice on picking a title

• Bad titles
  
  • 'Do Gettier cases show that knowledge is not Justified True Belief?'
  • 'Gettier cases and Justified True Belief'
  • Open ended question good to set for people who do not know in advance what they are expected to write, not one for yourself
• Good title
  
  • 'Does reliabilism provide a successful response to Gettier cases?'
    • First paragraph Gettier cases, second paragraph laying out reliabilist response
• Unusual title structures I'm particularly fond of
  
  • Just your thesis statement! Gives me a head up going in, no funny business
    • 'Realiabilism does not provide a successful response to Gettier cases because it is susceptible to counter-examples'

People's names

Introduction

• My area of expertise
  
  • I'm a genius
  • Ordinary Language Philosophy
• What people are interested in
  
  • Fundamental question asking
  • Difficult to make it stick

First example

• Pragmatic encroachment (group task)
  

  Low Stakes. Hannah and her wife Sarah are driving home on a Friday afternoon. They plan to stop at the bank on the way home to deposit their paychecks. It is not important that they do so, as they have no impending bills. But as they drive past the bank, they notice that the lines inside are very long, as they often are on Friday afternoons. Realising that it wasn’t very important that their paychecks are deposited right away, Hannah says, “I know the bank will be open tomorrow, since I checked the website. So we can deposit our paychecks tomorrow morning”.

  High Stakes. Hannah and her wife Sarah are driving home on a Friday afternoon. They plan to stop at the bank on the way home to deposit their paychecks. Since they have an impending bill coming due, and very little in their account, it is very important that they deposit their paychecks by Saturday. Hannah notes that she checked the website and the bank is open today. But, as Sarah points out, websites are sometimes outdated. Hannah says, “I guess you’re right, I don’t know that the bank will be open tomorrow”. (Stanley 2005: 3–4)

  1. What do you think about these examples? Is Hannah right (about the application of the concept of knowledge) in both cases?
  2. If you think she is right in both cases, what conclusions could we draw from these intuitions about criteria for knowing?
• The real question here
  
  • Are they really discussing 'knowledge'?
  • The question is just one of the reasonable way to act in this situation
    • Based on what they have been told, should they go into the bank or wait until the morning
    • Answering it well is a question about our judgement about how one would act reasonably, not our use of the work knowledge
    • Talk about knowledge here is just a way of getting your opinion on that

Second example

• Hugo
  

  Husband and wife! 'Hugo, engrossed in the paper, says, "I need some milk for my coffee". Odile replies, "You know where the milk is". Suddenly defensive, Hugo replies: "Well, I don’t really know that, do I? Perhaps the cat broke into the refrigerator, or there was just now a very stealthy milk thief, or it evaporated or suddenly congealed".'

  • Example also taken from literature
  • What is the first 'you know where the milk is' doing? How about the denial?
• Potential answers
  
  • Knowledge claims vs knowledge accusations
  • S knows that P if and only if no epistemic weakness with respect to whether P prevents S from properly using the proposition that P as a reason for action.
• Pragmatic vs semantics
  
  • Taking someone literally
  • What the person is doing with their words vs what their words mean
  • The second cases are just examples of that
• Responding to this criticism
  

  'The theorist’s question invites us to conceive of ourselves as reliable detectors of instances of knowledge, or of true (or false) utterances of sentences of the form "So and so knows that such and such"' – Avner Baz

  • Why would we expect there to be this level beyond an accurate description of what is going on in a situation?
  • Applying the magic power of intuition