Knowing That and Knowing About
Knowing That and Knowing About
This chapter discusses how seeming closure violations have been met with three main responses: counterfactualism (Nozick), contextualism (Cohen, DeRose, Lewis), and Carnap's idea that There are numbers is harder to know because it addresses a trickier sort of question. Our picture has some contextualism in it, since the subject matter of I am sitting changes in skeptical contexts, thereby “destroying our knowledge.” It has some counterfactualism in it, insofar as being on top a counterpossibility is being such that one would have noticed, had that counterpossibility obtained. It has some Carnap in it, too, for when the doubters come round, one takes refuge in the ordinary, “internal,” part of I am sitting, the part that concerns its old, nonskeptical, subject matter.
Keywords: closure violations, counterfactualism, contextualism, Carnap, aboutness