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Have a Cake and Eat it Too: Identifying a Missing Link in the Skeptical Puzzle

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Abstract

The skeptical puzzle consists of three allegedly incompatible claims: S knows that O, S doesn’t know that ~U, and the claim that knowledge is closed under the known entailment. I consider several famous instances of the puzzle and conclude that in all of those cases the presupposition that O entails ~U is false. I also consider two possible ways for trying to make it true and argue that both strategies ultimate fail. I conclude that this result at least completely discredits any solution that denies the principle of epistemic closure. At most, denying that O entails ~U can itself be seen as a novel solution to the puzzle, preferred to any other solution: it accommodates both non-skeptical and skeptical intuitions but does not require us to give up the principle of closure, embrace contextualism or subject-sensitive invariantism, or deny any commonly accepted principle of epistemology or logic.

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Notes

  1. Similar formulations of the puzzle were given by Pritchard (2002: 217), DeRose (1995: 1), Vogel (1999: 155), Dretske (1970) and Hawthorne (2004) among others. Notice that (P3) is sometimes specified in this way: If S doesn’t know that ~U and S knows that U entails ~O, then S doesn’t know that O.

  2. Vogel (1990: 17), argues that the problem generalizes whenever an ordinary proposition entails what he calls a lottery proposition that we intuitively do not know.

  3. This example comes from Hawthorne (2004: 2).

  4. See Dretske (1970) and Nozick (1981). See also Heller (1999) for a more recent approach of this type.

  5. See, for example, Cohen (1986), DeRose (1992) and Lewis (1996).

  6. The view known as subject-sensitive invariantism has been illustrated by Fantl and McGrath (2002). See also Hawthorne (2004) and Stanley (2005), who argues that knowledge is relative to the subject’s practical interests.

  7. For a thorough discussion of these points see Hawthorne (2004).

  8. While this example slightly differs from the one given by Hawthorne (2004), most of what follows applies equally to both cases, including all truly relevant points.

  9. Of course, one could deny that (P1) and (P2) can both be assumed to be true regardless of any other claims. I will address that possibility later on.

  10. As long as we agree that the conjunction is not known, of course, so that (P2) can still be presumed true. This is why it is fair to say that any unknown proposition can be used instead of U.

  11. In addition, this move obviously changes the nature of the initial puzzle since it becomes essentially independent of the principle of epistemic closure. Denying that knowledge is closed under the known entailment will not even count as a solution to this new “puzzle” at all, since the contradiction remains.

  12. Of course, one could deny that (P1) and (P2) could be true at the same time even if O does not entail ~U. Notice that this position would be completely independent of the principle of closure.

  13. This example comes from Dretske (1970: 1016).

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Correspondence to Nenad Popovic.

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Popovic, N. Have a Cake and Eat it Too: Identifying a Missing Link in the Skeptical Puzzle. Philosophia 47, 1539–1546 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-018-0048-9

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