Knowledge

How much of epistemology boils down to semantics? Sometimes it seems as though all we're really doing is trying to decide which situations warrant use of the word "know"; nothing actually changes in practice.

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This is a deep and important question. But let me first correct an apparent misimpression: namely, that, if the central questions of epistemology are semantic questions, then they are unimportant or uninteresting. On the contrary, semantics---the study of meaning---is an important subject in its own right, and it is arguably of central importance in any broadly "conceptual" investigation.

So, to the question. This is much disputed nowadays. There are some philosophers who think that many central epistemological questions are, fundamentally, questions about the meaning of the verb "to know". This group includes so-called contextualists, like Keith DeRose, but also philosophers like Jason Stanley and John Hawthorne, whose view is sometimes known as "situation-sensitive invariantism". On these views, our odd reactions to many of the puzzle cases are due to aspects of the way the verb "to know" behaves, or to certain not so obvious features of the concept of knowledge. Contextualists generally hold that skepticism itself can be resolved by the correct account of the semantics of "to know". Stanley, at least the last time I talked to him about this, wasn't prepared to go that far. I'm not sure about Hawthorne.

There's another camp, though, according to which epistemology doesn't have very much to do with semantics, be it the semantics of words or of concepts. Two pre-eminent representatives of that viewpoint would be Timothy Williamson, who thinks that knowledge is a certain kind of mental state and should be studied as such, and my ex-colleague Ernie Sosa, who thinks epistemology is fundamentally concerned with cognitive virtue.

So, well, this is philosophy. People disagree.

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