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The barn/barn façade thought experiment is familiar to most epistemologists. It is intended to present a counterexample to certain causal theories of knowledge; in it, a father driving through the countryside with his son says, ‘That's a barn’ while pointing to a barn. Unbeknownst to the father, however, a film crew is working in the area, and it has constructed several barn façades. While the father did correctly point to a barn when he made his assertion, he could have just as easily pointed to a barn façade, and so, many hold, he does not know that the structure at which he is pointing is in fact a barn. If this is so, then it follows that true beliefs formed from reliable causal processes (in this case, vision by a competent observer under normal conditions) may still not qualify as knowledge.
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- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 2009
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1 The earliest version of this of which I am aware is in Goldman, Alvin I., ‘Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge,’ The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 73, (1976), pp. 771-91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
2 For an extended defense of the epistemist position, see Sorensen, Roy, Vagueness and Contradiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)Google Scholar.
3 For an example of this approach, see Kaplan, Mark, ‘It's Not What You Know That Counts,’ Journal of Philosophy, vol. 82, (1985), pp. 350-63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 See his ‘The Pragmatic Dimension of Knowledge, Philosophical Studies, vol. 40, (1981), pp. 363-78. According to Dretske, factual knowledge – knowing that something is so – is not the sort of thing that one person can know better than another (as opposed to, say, knowing the history of the American Civil War, which different people know to different degrees). For example, if it is Friday, and you and I both know that it is Friday, there is no sense in which it can be said that I know that fact better than you do. We both know it as much as it can be known, and there is nothing that either of us can do to know it better (which is not to say that we may become more certain of what we know; but that is a separate matter). Such knowledge is, Dretske claims, ‘absolute. It is like being pregnant: an all or nothing affair’ (p. 363). Or to invoke another analogy, possessing factual knowledge is akin to boiling water: you can heat water beyond 100ºC, but you do not boil it better in doing so.