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EPISTEMIC INTUITIONS IN FAKE-BARN THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 March 2014

David Colaço ,
Wesley Buckwalter ,
Stephen Stich  and
Edouard Machery
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Abstract

In epistemology, fake-barn thought experiments are often taken to be intuitively clear cases in which a justified true belief does not qualify as knowledge. We report a study designed to determine whether members of the general public share this intuition. The data suggest that while participants are less inclined to attribute knowledge in fake-barn cases than in unproblematic cases of knowledge, they nonetheless do attribute knowledge to protagonists in fake-barn cases. Moreover, the intuition that fake-barn cases do count as knowledge is negatively correlated with age; older participants are less likely than younger participants to attribute knowledge in fake-barn cases. We also found that increasing the number of defeaters (fakes) does not decrease the inclination to attribute knowledge.

Type
Articles
Information
Episteme , Volume 11 , Issue 2 , June 2014 , pp. 199 - 212
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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