On Folk Epistemology: How we Think and Talk about Knowledge by Gerken Mikkel

Author:Gerken, Mikkel [Gerken, Mikkel]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780192525215
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2017-09-21T16:00:00+00:00

The linguistic fact articulated by Terminological Switch is an important counterbalance to Prominence of ‘Knowledge.’ If even folk epistemological talk provides fairly nuanced phrases for assessing action and assertion, epistemologists should not replace such phrases with crude knowledge ascriptions. Our job as epistemologists is to refine, develop, and occasionally revise the resources that folk epistemology provides, not to ignore it in favor of more primitive epistemological vocabulary.

The debate over whether ordinary language supports KNAS has many further dimensions that I cannot address here.11 But the discussion above questions whether the ordinary language considerations support KNAS over WASA. Rather, they indicate some important facts about our folk epistemological practices—viz. the idea that knowledge ascriptions often serve crude but useful functions as a communicative heuristic.

A brief word on lottery paradoxes: I am inclined toward the view that we do know lottery propositions. But if we do know lottery propositions, the fact that KNAS can explain the infelicity of assertions of them does not motivate it. Of course, our disinclination to assert lottery propositions requires explanation, and I am favorable to the view that a cognitive bias is partly responsible. Indeed, this is another terrific case for investigating the relationship between folk epistemology and epistemology. But since it requires a treatment of its own, I will set it aside here (see Turri and Friedman 2014; Friedman and Turri 2015 for empirical data; and, for discussion, Hawthorne 2004; Kvanvig 2009; McGlynn 2014; McKinnon 2015).

Let me note a response to purported counterexamples to KNAS. Turri has argued that in cases that appear to be counterexamples to the sufficiency of knowledge for assertion, the speech act is not an assertion. If so, it is not subject to the knowledge norm (Turri 2010a, 2011). Thus, Turri takes conversational context to bear on the type of speech act rather than, as contextualists would have it, on the content. A central problem with this speech act contextualism is one that Turri attributes to a referee: “the scale of speech acts might not be as fine-grained as the scale of epistemic standards” (Turri 2010a, fn. 24). Turri responds that while speech act contextualism must postulate an extremely wide range of kinds of speech acts, ordinary contextualism must postulate an extremely wide range of senses of ‘knows.’ However, the fact that speech act contextualism fares no worse than ordinary contextualism in this regard does not mean that it fares well. Rather, the problem challenges both views. Moreover, even if the account explains the context-sensitivity of epistemic assertibility, it does not explain the context-sensitivity of epistemic actionability. After all, it is highly implausible that context changes the relevant action type. So, speech act contextualism does nothing to respond to cases such as MINEFIELD or to block arguments for pragmatic encroachment from KNAC (Fantl and McGrath 2009, 2012).

In comparison, WA and WASA can provide a unified account since the range of required positive epistemic positions can vary in degree as well as in kind (Gerken 2014). Commonplace qualifications of assertions underwrite this—e.g., ‘I’m reasonably sure that p’ or ‘We have some reason to believe that p.

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