"Counterepistemic Knowledge"
We know that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet. We also know that if Shakespeare didn’t write Hamlet, someone else did. This variety of conditional knowledge — where you know that (indicative) if P, then Q, while also knowing that P is false — is curious. Although it is tied up with what is true at possibilities that are counterfactual relative to what is known, it isn’t a kind of counterfactual knowledge. (To know that if Shakespeare didn’t write Hamlet, someone else did, isn’t to know that if Shakespeare hadn’t written Hamlet, someone else would have.) I label this sort of conditional knowledge counterepistemic. If ordinary thought and talk are any guide, we possess a nontrivial body of counterpistemic knowledge. But it is not easy to make theoretical sense of this knowledge, and not easy to make semantic sense of the associated language of counterepistemic knowledge ascription. I’ll bring some of the main problems into focus, and take some steps. Inter alia we’ll see that these ascriptions make for apparent failures of factivity, and that counterepistemic knowledge is hard to construe as knowledge of facts.
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