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The Information-Theoretic Account of Knowledge, Closure and the KK Thesis Cover

The Information-Theoretic Account of Knowledge, Closure and the KK Thesis

By: James Mattingly  
Open Access
|Jan 2023

Abstract

One common objection to Dretske’s Information Theoretic Account of Knowledge (ITAK) is that it violates closure. I show that it does not, and that extant arguments attempting to establish that it does rely instead on the KK thesis. That thesis does fail for ITAK. I show moreover that an interesting consequence of ITAK obeying the closure principle after all is that on this view if skepticism is false, we can have a great deal of empirical knowledge, but it is in principle impossible to know that skepticism is false. In short, a proper understanding of how ITAK closes off the KK thesis shows that we can 1) take seriously the skeptic, we can 2) respond to her appropriately that we do have knowledge and we can 3) keep closure.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/disp-2022-0007 | Journal eISSN: 2182-2875 | Journal ISSN: 0873-626X
Language: English, Portuguese
Page range: 105 - 132
Published on: Jan 17, 2023
Published by: University of Lisbon
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services
Publication frequency: 4 issues per year

© 2023 James Mattingly, published by University of Lisbon
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 License.