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Belief May Not Be a Necessary Condition for Knowledge

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Abstract

Most discussions in epistemology assume that believing that p is a necessary condition for knowing that p. In this paper, I will present some considerations that put this view into doubt. The candidate cases for knowledge without belief are the kind of cases that are usually used to argue for the so-called ‘extended mind’ thesis.

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Notes

  1. Note that the attribution in these cases typically takes the form of a know-wh construction. Schaffer (2007) notes that ‘know-wh’ attributions are ubiquitous (seem to be more frequent than ‘know-that’ attributions). Different analyses of know-wh ascriptions exist: some reduce it to know-that ascriptions, some—like Schaffer—offer a more complex analysis. Still, most proposals agree that know-wh ascriptions, just like know-that ascriptions, identify informational knowledge rather than skill-related knowledge (if that distinction makes sense at all).

  2. One may make similar observations about everyday usage in the cases presented by Myers-Schulz and Schwitzgebel. Myers-Schulz and Schwitzgebel then conducted a survey among undergraduates of their university on whether protagonists in their stories know or believe certain things, and they used the results of the survey to support their conclusion. So one way to develop the thesis of the current paper would be to survey people for their responses to ordinary extended mind scenarios. However, I have some reservations about this argumentative strategy, so I will not pursue this direction in this paper.

  3. Incidentally, Craig's book was published years before the extended mind hypothesis became a subject of discussion.

  4. I cannot see a similar move in the case of externalism about mental content, so my remarks here are confined to the kind of externalism involved in Otto-type cases.

References

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Acknowledgments

Talks bearing more or less close relation to this paper were presented at the 2013 Pacific APA meeting, at the 2013 Swedish Congress of Philosophy and at a workshop on the Varieties of Externalism in Edinburgh. Thanks to Brie Gertler, Sandy Goldberg and Tim Crane for discussion, and to Timothy E. Kunke for commenting on the talk in Edinburgh. Two anonymous referees for Erkenntnis provided very constructive suggestions for revision.

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Correspondence to Katalin Farkas.

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Farkas, K. Belief May Not Be a Necessary Condition for Knowledge. Erkenn 80, 185–200 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-014-9620-2

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