Angela O'Sullivan
Published: 21 January 2019
My project has two aims: to defend an infallibilist account of knowledge and argue in favour of the sceptical conclusion regarding knowledge.
University of Edinburgh
My project has two aims: to defend an infallibilist account of knowledge and argue in favour of the sceptical conclusion regarding knowledge.
Firstly, Knowledge requires strict standards that we (almost) never meet, and so we are(almost) never in a position to know anything. Secondly, I aim to diffuse this alleged problem by developing an antirealist account of knowledge discourse that treats knowledge discourse as fictionally true, as opposed to literally true. This research draws on antirealism, and particularly fictionalism, as a strategy of dealing with local forms of scepticism in other areas of Philosophy – for example, moral Fictionalism as a response to error theory in meta-ethics and Fictionalism about mathematics.
I hope to show that Fictionalism about knowledge discourse can handle some of the problems usually attributed to infallibilism and scepticism, but I am also interested in the broader consequences of adopting epistemic antirealism. For example, I plan to explore how an antirealist theory of knowledge discourse might account for disagreement between equally informed and equally rational agents, as well as traditional issues in epistemology such as Gettier cases and concessive knowledge attributions.
First published: 21 January 2019