As I noted, we’re back from our vacation, but I want to quickly post a worry about Subject Sensitive Invariantism before I crash.

Generally, when someone utters a sentence of the form “I don’t know X” we’d be inclined to believe that they don’t believe X.

Now, recall Stanley’s High Stakes Scenario when Hannah says she doesn’t know that the bank will be open. (I layout Stanley’s cases in this recent post)

It’s claimed by Stanley that the common intuition is that Hannah’s utterance is true. Isn’t the fact that knowledge denials generally indicate a lack of belief a satisfactory explanation for that intuition. If a denial of knowledge suggests lack of belief, and belief is a necessary condition on knowledge, then we have a good candidate explanation of the intuition here. Don’t we?

Bleg: It’s been a while since I read both the Stanley and Hawthorne books. Is this addressed anywhere?

3 Responses to “Knowledge Denials and Belief”

1. 

   Jonathan Ichikawa

   July 20, 2009 at 6:30 am

   This is the strategy of Brian Weatherson’s “Can we do without pragmatic encroachment”.

   Reply
2. 

   Andrew Cullison

   July 20, 2009 at 1:17 pm

   Thanks for the heads up.

   Reply
3. 

   Josh May

   July 20, 2009 at 4:21 pm

   My fellow authors (Sinnott-Armstrong, Hull, and Zimmerman) and bring this sort of issue up in our paper:

   http://philpapers.org/rec/MAYPIR

   See the bottom of the first (non-full) paragraph on the third page of the draft. We add it on to the list of complaints that Schaffer makes about Stanley’s versions of the bank cases.

   But apparently it doesn’t make much of a difference to ordinary people’s judgments. Feltz & Zarpentine, unlike us, used Stanley’s exact scenarios in their first experiment reported here:

   http://philpapers.org/rec/FELDYK

   (See the first appendix on p. 24 of the draft.) Yet they still didn’t get the results Stanley would predict.

   Reply