Metaphysics and Epistemology Group (Tuesday - Week 3, HT25)

Abstract: It’s tempting to think that we can measure the quality or strength of someone’s knowledge by the number of iterations it permits: you know p better if you know that you know p, better yet if you know that you know that you know p, and so on. I show that this idea is deeply misguided. Even in set-ups that look maximally friendly to the idea, one can construct cases where someone goes from having available only a single iteration of knowledge that p to having arbitrarily many such iterations, without their knowledge that p becoming better in any way. This has interesting implications for knowledge norms on action, assertion, and inquiry.