Epistemic luminosity, factives, and anti-factives

Abstract

KK, or Epistemic Luminosity, is the thesis that knowledge is transparent. While unpopular for quite some time, KK has lately had a comeback. Most of the discussion aims to defuse anti KK arguments concerning inexact knowledge and the norm of assertion. Dorst (Mind 128(512):1227–1259, 2019), however, presents an entirely novel argument for KK. He argues that conditionals of the form ‘If \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\lnot$$\end{document}Kp, then p’, such as ‘If I don’t know that Padua is in Italy, it’s in Italy’, are strange and that KK can explain why. In this paper, we argue that this explanation fails. If we accept it, we cannot explain why seemingly similar conditionals of the form ‘If \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\lnot$$\end{document}FBp, then \documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$$\lnot$$\end{document}p’, such as ‘If I don’t falsely believe that Padua is in France, it’s not in France’, are strange as well. Along the way, we offer further support for a relevance based account of the strangeness of both types of conditionals.