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Tracking Theory of Knowledge, Part III

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Last week, in two posts on the "tracking theory of knowledge," we reached the following point:

1) The tracking theory seems to capture many of our intuitions about what it means to know something,

2) It resolves the Gettier problems,

3) But it creates a glitch of its own -- it isn't epistemically closed. It generates circumstances in which I know p, and I know that p implies q, but I can't be said to know that q.

Nozick, though, thought of the non-closure as a good thing: a feature, not a bug, because it allowed him to address global skepticism hypotheses.

Suppose we concede that I don't know that I am not a brain in a vat, or that I don't know that I am not the victim of a joke by a malicious demon. Should this bother us? Specifically, should we infer from ignorance on this point that we don't know anything at all?

Well, we would have to if we thought knowledge was epistemically closed. I know (we want to say) that I am now sitting in a green chair.  If I were not sitting in a green chair, I would not know it. But (we want to concede) I don't know that I am not a brain in a vat. Yet this brings us precisely to the non-closure situation we've discussed. I  know p (I am sitting in a green chair) , and I know that p implies q (I know that I am not inside an unfurnished vat!), yet I don't know q.

Nozick likes this. The tracking theory and the abandonment of closure means that we can with good philosophical conscience concede global skepticism while setting it aside as irrelevant to our lives, the lives within which we sit in green chairs, know we are doing so, and the tracking theory of knowledge applies.

BUT ... there are some epistemologists who believe that non-closure is a bug, and an important one. They like the theory, though, and want to keep it, but want the debug it. Hence tracking-with-closure theorists and the patch-ups they offer. Murali Ramachandran is one example.

https://academic.oup.com/analysis/article-abstract/75/2/217/165407/Knowing-by-way-of-tracking-and-epistemic-closure

I think I've mucked about in the epistemological barn for as long as I dare now, and I'll discuss something else tomorrow.



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