Why is Epistemology so boring? Reading about subject-sensitive invariantism must be the least sexy thing in the world. Actually, it isn’t so much Epistemology as the guys I’ve been assigned to read in this class. Has anyone here struggled through Timothy Williamson’s Knowledge and its Limits? Man, that takes real effort. What annoys me is that what he’s saying really isn’t all that complicated, he just makes it sound like it is. He does love presenting everything schematically.
I don’t know what the point of this post is, I’m struggling through John Hawthorne’s Knowledge and Lotteries. Here’s a (philosophical) question for you all to ponder,
Me: I know I won’t be able to afford to go on Safari this summer.
John: No you don’t, you’ve got a lottery ticket, remember?
Me: Ah, well I guess I don’t know.
Whats going on here? Did I ever know I couldn’t go on Safari? Do I still know? Does ‘know’ mean the same thing in both of my statements?
Oh, and try to answer as if you weren’t a world-weary sceptic, like most people on here. Just content yourselves with knowing that when epistemologists talk about knowing things they tacitly assume that knowledge doesn’t require absolute certainty. Those answers are quite possibly correct, but they don’t require much mental ingenuity. If some philosophers didn’t spend their careers defending absurdities it’s amazing how much they could get done I suspect, some of the solutions you read to this stuff are just incredibly clever.