western philosophy has a powerful anti-skepticism strain, to the point where “you can know something” is almost axiomatic
I’m pretty pessimistic about the strain of philosophy as you’ve described it. I have yet to run into a sense of “know” that is binary (i.e. not “believed with probability”) that I would accept as an accurate description of the phenomenon of “knowledge” in the real world rather than as an occasionally useful approximation. Between the preface paradox (or its minor modification, the lottery paradox) and Fitch’s paradox of knowability, I don’t trust the “knowledge” operator in any logical claim.
In my limited experience, it feels like a lot of epistemologists have sadly “missed the bus” on this one. Like, they’ve gone so far down the wrong track that it’s a lot of work to even explain how our way of thinking about it could be relevant to their area of concern.
I’m pretty pessimistic about the strain of philosophy as you’ve described it. I have yet to run into a sense of “know” that is binary (i.e. not “believed with probability”) that I would accept as an accurate description of the phenomenon of “knowledge” in the real world rather than as an occasionally useful approximation. Between the preface paradox (or its minor modification, the lottery paradox) and Fitch’s paradox of knowability, I don’t trust the “knowledge” operator in any logical claim.
In my limited experience, it feels like a lot of epistemologists have sadly “missed the bus” on this one. Like, they’ve gone so far down the wrong track that it’s a lot of work to even explain how our way of thinking about it could be relevant to their area of concern.