Elusive Knowledge

by David Kellogg Lewis

Lewis aims to argue against skepticism without giving in to fallibilism. How is infallible knowledge possible?

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction

Essay/PDF

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

David Kellogg Lewis was a 20th century philosopher. Lewis taught briefly at UCLA and then at Princeton from 1970 until his death. He is also closely associated with Australia, whose philosophical community he visited almost annually for more than thirty years. He has made ground-breaking contributions in philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophical logic. He is probably best known for his controversial modal realist stance: that there exist infinitely many concretely existing and causally isolated parallel universes, of which ours is just one, and which play the role of possible worlds in the analysis of necessity and possibility.

-wikipedia

Reviews

[Wilf Offord · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of my favourite David Lewis papers, and as an exposition of epistemic contextualism it is unmatched in lucidity, concreteness and rhetorical style (get out of here DeRose!). Once again David Lewis sets the gold standard for how philosophy should be done, in his characteristic chatty tone.

The paper is self-contained, which on one hand is great as little background knowledge is needed, but on the other it might be nice to see a little more philosophical geography done to clarify where exactly Lewis's position fits along the standard battle lines of epistemology (internalist, externalist etc.) and perhaps to show whether it has anything new to say about the generic objections faced by positions fitting these moulds.

My one major gripe with this theory is that it completely ignores knowledge of necessary truths like mathematical facts. Lewis believes there is only one necessary proposition, which everyone knows trivially, but this does not explain our ignorance of things like goldbach's conjecture. My diagnosis is that this is because Lewis has opted to ignore what he calls "hyperintensional" knowledge. Unfortunately for him, knowledge as we know it seems to be hyperintensional - whether or not we know a given proposition can depend upon the form in which it is presented, such as the Hesperus/Phosphorus case from Kripke's Naming and Necessity. Once again, what Lewis has done here is a major achievement, but I think sadly at best it can be a first approximation.

[Olehdubno · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the easier reads to digest from epistemology. My take away is: Skepticism is much like an unmovable boulder of infallible knowledge and fallibilism is a whirlpool of constantly changing knowledge. David Lewis splashes the boulder and draws on moderate evidence supporting skepticism and fallibilism.