Postgraduates work in progress

Speaker: Adam Bricker (University of Edinburgh)

Title: An Empirical Argument Against Factive Knowledge

Abstract: Here I will first argue that if we assume: (1) The mental content that guides motor action is (a) reflectively inaccessible and (b) not perfectly accurate, (2) Ordinary perceptual beliefs guide motor action, and (3) Knowledge is factive, then it follows that (C) the ordinary perceptual beliefs that guide motor action cannot be known. This poses an interesting problem, as there is compelling empirical evidence for (1), (3) is all but universally accepted in epistemology, and either rejecting (2) or accepting (C) would go against our ordinary practice of belief/knowledge attribution. I will then argue that the best solution to this problem is to replace factivity with a weaker constraint on knowledge.