Ram Neta (UNC Chapel Hill)
This paper argues that knowledge is indefeasible, and that we have a great deal of it. I begin with Kripke’s “dogmatism paradox,” according to which knowledge licenses rational dogmatism: if one knows that p, then one knows that any evidence against p is misleading, and so one is not rationally required to modify one’s opinion in light of such evidence. I argue that neither Harman’s influential response nor Rachel Fraser’s recent Volitionist response solves the paradox. Fraser’s objection to Harman is that he cannot handle a family of revenge puzzles; I argue that Fraser cannot handle them either, and I present a further puzzle — the puzzle of dogmatic closure — that defeats both proposals. Since no adequate conclusion-denying solution is available, we should accept the conclusion of Kripke’s argument. I then argue that accepting it has no skeptical consequences at all. The widespread assumption that it does rests on a confusion between the truth of certain conditionals and claims of metaphysical dependence, together with the “highest common factor” conception of awareness that McDowell taught us to resist.