About knowing what something is

Authors

  • André Joffily Abath
  • Eduarda Calado Barbosa

Keywords:

Knowledge. Epistemology. Contextualism.

Abstract

Knowledge ascriptions of the form “S knows what X is” are common in everyday language use. In spite of that, the knowledge of what something is has been largely forgotten by the epistemological literature. Our purpose in this paper is to start to remediate that. We will be defending a contextualist account of the knowledge of what something is, characterized by two theses. According to the first, the requirements for one to know what something is may vary given the context in which the knowledge is attributed, on a scale with degrees of strength. According to the second, “know”, when occurring in sentences of the form “S knows what X is”, is a context-sensitive term, being, at least in part, semantically constituted by requirements that may vary according to the context of attribution, on a scale with degrees of strength.

Author Biographies

André Joffily Abath

Doutor em Filosofia e Pesquisador da Universidade Federal da Paraíba (UFPB)

Eduarda Calado Barbosa

Mestranda em Filosofia pela Universidade Federal da Paraíba (UFPB)

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Published

2010-01-01

Issue

No. 3

Section

Conhecimento e Linguagem

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