The Apparent Factive Attitude View

Abstract

Chapter 5 takes up the question of which way of developing a non-factive answer to what evidence perceptual experiences provide about the external world is most promising. Two forms of the apparent defeasibility of knowledge are introduced: objective defeat and subjective defeat. Each view’s resources for accounting for both objective and subjective defeat are compared, and it is argued that the non-factive content view fails to account for both objective and subjective defeat. In contrast, the apparent factive attitude view, because of its closer relationship to disjunctivist alternatives, is argued to offer clean treatments of both objective and subjective defeat—even better than the disjunctivist alternatives from which it borrows. The distinctive commitments of the apparent factive attitude view are defended, its distinctive treatment of the bootstrapping problem for dogmatism is introduced, and the resulting view is contrasted with Matthew McGrath’s objective looks theory.