UPCOMING EVENTS
WORKS-IN-PROGRESS
Speakers Series
Title: “Ignorance and Epistemic Insouciance”
Speaker: Anne Meylan (University of Zurich)
Date/Time: Thursday, February 6th, 12:00-1:30pm
Location: 8th Floor Boardroom, Jorgenson Hall
Title: “”Knowledge is a Factual Attitude”
Speaker: Simon Wimmer (University of Warwick)
Date/Time: Thursday, February 27th, 12:00-1:30pm
Location: 10th Floor Boardroom, Jorgenson Hall
Abstract: I argue for factualism, the view that knowledge takes a fact as content (where facts are not true propositions). I begin by introducing linguistic data involving the verbs 'know' and 'discover'. My main contention is that factualism is part of the best explanation of that data. After sketching that explanation, I show that three alternative responses to the linguistic data---one due to Jeff King and Wataru Uegaki, another due to Patrick Elliott and Graeme Forbes, and a final one due to Jake Nebel---fare significantly worse. I close by highlighting that factualism has important consequences for epistemology: it undermines the widespread project of understanding what knowledge is in terms of belief.
Title: "Why Knowledge isn’t the Most General Factive Stative Attitude: The Case of Self-Knowledge"
Speaker: Lucy Campbell (University of Warwick)
Date/Time: Friday, March 13th, 1:30-3:00pm
Location: 4th Floor Boardroom, Jorgenson Hall
Abstract: The success of Knowledge First epistemology depends, inter alia, on the provision of a successful positive non-reductive account of knowledge. Timothy Williamson has offered just such an account, suggesting that knowledge is the most general factive stative attitude. But any positive account of propositional knowledge will be successful only if it accommodates propositional knowledge in all its forms. I pursue two tasks in this paper. My main task is to argue that there are cases of self-knowledge which fail to satisfy the account of knowledge as the most general factive stative attitude. There is a broader lesson to be learned from this result: the reason why Williamson’s account has trouble understanding self-knowledge is that it entails that when S knows that p, she has a way of knowing that p. This principle is accepted very commonly in contemporary epistemology (albeit it in various forms). My subsidiary task is to outline a better way of thinking about propositional knowledge, one which rejects this problematic yet commonly held principle."