Abstracts

Knowledge and the Imagination of (Actualized) Possibilities

According to David Lewis, the predicate ‘knows’ is context-sensitive in the sense that its truth conditions vary across conversational contexts, which stretch or compress the domain of error possibilities to be eliminated by the subject’s evidence [Lewis, 1996; Lewis, 1979]. Such an account assigns a major role to the subject’s negative capacities of eliminating possibilities, besides the ignoring of the negligible. In contrast to this view, I will show that the pruning branches off the tree of counterpossibilities does not exhaust the process of knowledge attribution. I will therefore introduce a new imagination-based vector of value, which explains how ‘know’ comes in degrees: the satisfaction of ‘know better’ is also made to depend on the subject’s positive capacity of imagining (actualized) possibilities connected in a relevant way with the subject’s (true) beliefs.