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evolve
naturally
? The answer seems to have clearly a social nature, which brings us
to Harman's well known examples (1968), and Meeker's idea that "there seems to be
an inescapably
normative
dimension to social defeaters" (Meeker, 2004, p.162).
Imagine, for instance that in our previous example the observer is a friend of
S2
who
has witnessed how after hitting
S1
and warning him against denouncing him again,
S2
goes to have a chat with another of his friends. Suppose also that while going away
from there, the observer hears how the teacher says to a colleague 'Oh no,
S1
is
crying'. Observe that also in this case, for the observer the teacher does not know
at
t
0
from the third person perspective, and the reason is that the situation
naturally
evolves in a way that will eventually undermine his belief that
˕
. The observer sees
A
as belonging to a particular community. This circumstance determines the
natural
evolution of the situation. The teacher
ought
to run towards the cry, but once he is
there no one will tell him what has actually happened. The new information he will
get there, according to the prediction the observer makes, will only have the effect of
undermining his previous belief. Observe that from the observer's perspective it is the
socially expected way in which the situation evolves, and not the actual way in which
it does which is relevant.
To sum up: The belief that
˕
of an agent
A
is knowledge for
B
at a time
t
from the
third person perspective if, and only if,
˕
˕
is knowledge for
B
at
t
from the first person
perspective, and the situation in which
was elicited does not evolve (witness-case)
or
naturally
evolve (prediction-case) in a way in which the new items added to the set
of salient beliefs undermine, from
B
's perspective,
A
's belief that
˕
˕
.
3
Conclusion
We propose an approach to propositional knowledge based on the idea of successful
behavior. Our pragmatistic approach finds truth, seen as transcendental, as too heavy
a burden to knowledge. Because, how are we suppose to prove that we have attained
the truth? We have no idea. Our intention, following Peirce, has been to show that we
do not need to care.
Acknowledgements.
We would like to thank especially Adriana Renero for the time
and interest she devoted to discuss 'knowledge' with us. We are also thankful to Juliet
Floyd for her comments on a previous version of this article, and to the three
reviewers. This work has been partly supported by the projects
FFI2013-44836-P
of
the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, and P12-HUM-1216 of the
Junta de Andalucía, each of which is gratefully acknowledged. This paper would not
have been possible either without the Fulbright/Ministerio de Educación postdoctoral
grant. The research of Rohit Parikh was supported in part by a grant from CUNY.
References
1.
Aliseda-Llera, A.: Seeking Explanations: Abduction in Logic, Philosophy of Science and
Artificial Intelligence. ILLC Dissertation Series 1997-4 (1997)
