Robin Stenwall: "Attentive Knowledge"

Robin Stenwall, Lund University: "Attentive Knowledge"

Abstract
The presentation is divided into a negative and a positive part. Traditional truthmaker solutions to the Gettier problem are based on the intuition that knowledge can only be defined as true justified belief if the source of justification is suitably connected to that which makes the proposition believed true. What Gettier cases describe, according to this intuition, are epistemic circumstances where that which makes the belief true and that which justifies the belief have, in some relevant sense, become disjoint. The task that faces advocates of the standard truthmaker solution is to tell us what the ‘relevant’ sense is meant to be. There are three suggestions on offer in the literature and, in the first negative part of the presentation, I will show that each of them is wanting. In the second positive part, I will present a novel attentional solution to the Gettier problem. The solution points out that Gettier cases typically rely on some disconnect, not between truthmakers and justmakers for a belief, but between the truthmakers for a belief and the attended potential truthmakers for that belief (APT for short), and that the Gettier problem can be dissolved by specifying the exact relation that must obtain between the latter two. The presentation ends with a discussion about how attentive knowledge show potential to also deal with the Ginet-Goldman problem, a problem that has been an obstacle for traditional truthmaker solutions.