Two Notions Of Safety

Swiss Philosophical Preprints (2010)
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Abstract

Timothy Williamson (1992, 224–5) and Ernest Sosa (1996) have ar- gued that knowledge requires one to be safe from error. Something is said to be safe from happening iff it does not happen at “close” worlds. I expand here on a puzzle noted by John Hawthorne (2004, 56n) that suggests the need for two notions of closeness. Counterfac- tual closeness is a matter of what could in fact have happened, given the specific circumstances at hand. The notion is involved in the semantics for counterfactuals and is the one epistemologists have typically assumed. Normalized closeness is rather a matter of what could typically have happened, that is, what would go on in a class of normal alternatives to actuality, irrespectively of whether or not they could have happened in the circumstances at hand.

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Julien Dutant
King's College London

Citations of this work

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References found in this work

Elusive knowledge.David Lewis - 1996 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (4):549 – 567.
Knowledge and Action.John Hawthorne & Jason Stanley - 2008 - Journal of Philosophy 105 (10):571-590.
Knowledge as Credit for True Belief.John Greco - 2003 - In Michael Raymond DePaul & Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski (eds.), Intellectual virtue: perspectives from ethics and epistemology. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 111-134.
Anti-luck epistemology.Duncan Pritchard - 2007 - Synthese 158 (3):277-297.
Unsafe Knowledge.Juan Comesaña - 2005 - Synthese 146 (3):395-404.

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