Hawthorne’s might-y failure: a reply to “Knowledge and epistemic necessity”

Philosophical Studies 173 (5):1165-1177 (2016)
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Abstract

In “Knowledge and epistemic necessity,” John Hawthorne gives a defense of what he rightly calls the “standard approach” to epistemic possibility against what he calls a new “competing idea” presented by Dougherty and Rysiew which he notes has been “endorsed and elaborated upon” by Fantl and McGrath. According to the standard approach, roughly, p is epistemically possible for S if S doesn’t know that not-p. The new approach has it that p is epistemically possible if p has a non-zero epistemic probability. Both approaches, he notes, would explain the oddness of CKAs, utterances of the form “p, but possibly not p.” However, he offers a number of arguments designed to show that the standard approach has other advantages. In this paper, we undermine Hawthorne’s reasons for favoring the standard approach over Dougherty and Rysiew’s alternative approach

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Author Profiles

Trent Dougherty
University of Rochester (PhD)
Nicholas Colgrove
Augusta University

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References found in this work

Elusive knowledge.David Lewis - 1996 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (4):549 – 567.
Elusive Knowledge.David Lewis - 2000 - In Sven Bernecker & Fred I. Dretske (eds.), Knowledge: readings in contemporary epistemology. New York: Oxford University Press.
Elusive Knowledge.David Lewis - 1999 - In Keith DeRose & Ted A. Warfield (eds.), Skepticism: a contemporary reader. New York: Oxford University Press.
Fallibilism, epistemic possibility, and concessive knowledge attributions.Trent Dougherty & Patrick Rysiew - 2008 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 78 (1):123-132.

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