Abstract

This book attacks an assortment of tendencies and assumptions that the author believes endemic to traditional epistemology. Perhaps the main target is what she sees as a tendency to sublimate the concepts of knowledge and belief, whose roles in everyday life are mundane and unsystematic, into rigid abstractions. This tendency is said to show itself in the allegedly false assumptions that propositions are the objects of knowledge and belief, and that there is a definite set of propositions that one knows and another that one believes. One or the other of these assumptions is said to underlie Chisholm’s attempt to state necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge, Prichard’s to distinguish knowledge from belief, Malcolm’s to distinguish a ’strong’ from a ‘weak’ sense of ‘to know’, Moore’s to rebut skepticism by giving examples of things he knows, and Descartes’ to imagine that all his beliefs are false. All make the mistake, Wolgast thinks, of speaking of knowledge or belief in the abstract, without reference to the actual use of language. In particular, Chisholm, Prichard, and Moore fail to realize that the force of ‘I know’ varies from context to context.