Knowledge Closure and Competent Deduction
Santiago Echeverri  1@  
1 : New York University [New York]  -  Site web
70 Washington Square South, New York, NY 10012 -  États-Unis

Knowledge closure spells out the intuition that agents can extend their knowledge by performing competent deductions from what they know. Alas, this principle leads to the puzzle of epistemic immodesty: If agents used deduction across the board, they could acquire knowledge that they do not seem able to acquire by those means. A traditional response is to reject knowledge closure. A less radical solution is to preserve knowledge closure but impose limits on the knowledge that can be acquired by deduction. Contextualism and contrastivism exemplify the compatibilist strategy. I shall defend a new form of compatibilism. My starting point will be the emerging consensus that competent deduction must figure in the antecedent of knowledge closure. I suggest that competent deduction requires the selection of premise-beliefs that are relevant to answering the question at hand, and I submit that this requirement is not fulfilled in alleged cases of epistemic immodesty.


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