Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains
Knowledge as Requiring Objective Certainty
Some brief Substacknotes on Butchvarov for Elliot, our resident epistemologist.
One thought on “Knowledge as Requiring Objective Certainty”
I’ve always liked Butchvarov’s criterion of knowledge. But I remember expressing it in a graduate seminar when I was at the University of Toronto, and the other grad students went nuts (I was still an undergrad, so that may be part of the reason for their response).
Years later, I realized that they probably understood me to mean something like that knowledge is only possible for beings who can never be mistaken about anything.
For me, as an externalist epistemologist, the key is that “knowledge” is not synonymous with “indubatibility”.
In other words, it is possible to be in a state of knowledge with regard to a belief, X, but still be in a state of subjective uncertainty with regard to one’s epistemic state with regard to X.
As far as I can see, pared down to its bare bones “impossible to be mistaken about X (at time t)” is more or less substitutable, salve veritate, with “X is true (at time t)”
I’ve always liked Butchvarov’s criterion of knowledge. But I remember expressing it in a graduate seminar when I was at the University of Toronto, and the other grad students went nuts (I was still an undergrad, so that may be part of the reason for their response).
Years later, I realized that they probably understood me to mean something like that knowledge is only possible for beings who can never be mistaken about anything.
For me, as an externalist epistemologist, the key is that “knowledge” is not synonymous with “indubatibility”.
In other words, it is possible to be in a state of knowledge with regard to a belief, X, but still be in a state of subjective uncertainty with regard to one’s epistemic state with regard to X.
As far as I can see, pared down to its bare bones “impossible to be mistaken about X (at time t)” is more or less substitutable, salve veritate, with “X is true (at time t)”