[Bups-dis] truth tracking and necessity

[Andrew Bacon]

Hi James,

> Nozick doesn't need to go anything like as far as to say if you believe p
> then you know p (if p is necessary). That would only be the case if the
> fourth condition were abandoned too. 

Perhaps this is so if Nozick adopts a different semantics for counterfactuals. I
believe I already said this was an option, and Craig also clarified Nozicks
position. 

However under the Lewis/Stalnaker reading of the counterfactual, if p is
necessary 2), 3) and 4) will come out true, and if you further believe p then
Nozick is committed to saying you know p. Like you said, 3) comes out vacuously
true since ¬p is necessarily false. On Stalnaker semantics the closest world in
which p is true is the actual world, and you believe p there so 4) is true. On
Lewis semantics, there is a unique closest world, and that is the actual world
again, so you believe p in all the closest worlds so 4) is true here too.
(Standardly the set of worlds with a closeness measure is assumed to be a metric
space, and you can actually prove what I have said here.)




> As it is Nozick ends up with a sort of
> back door reliablism: S knows p iff:
> 
> 1)S believes p
> 2)p is true
> 3)If p were true and S were to use method M to arrive at a belief whether
> (or not) p, then S would believe, via M, that p.
> 
> I think you can dispense with the method M stuff if you use a possible
> worlds account, but I am starting to think that there may be a sting in the
> tail of possible worlds talk in epistemology.

I think that possible worlds can be very useful in epistemology. I would say all
this shows is that Nozick's analysis is wrong, or at least incompatible with the
possible worlds approach to counterfactuals.

> 
> x
> 
> James
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-- 
Andrew Bacon
Lady Margaret Hall
07830048336
http://users.ox.ac.uk/~lady1900