I’m giving a talk at Northwestern today called “Descriptivism Meets Gettier” as part of their Epistemology Brown Bag Lecture Series.
I’ll post a draft of the paper later (I’ll likely want to make changes after the talk), but here’s the basic idea.
I think Descriptivism (about semantic content) is committed to certain speakers having knowledge in cases where intuitively they do not because they are in a Gettier case (even in conjunction with most plausible post-Gettier attempts to analyze knowledge)
Descriptivism also has the reverse problem. I argue that there are possible cases where speakers obviously know a certain proposition, but Descriptivists are committed to saying they lack knowledge because speakers are Gettiered with respect to the relevant descriptive proposition.
(Posted from my Android phone)
This sounds like a really cool paper. Please do post a draft once you get one ready. Even better, post a post about the main arguments (expanding on what you say above a bit more).
I’d be really interested to read that, did it happen?
Hi Matthew,
It did happen. I’m working on polishing up the draft. I can send you a copy if you like.
Thank you Andrew,
I’d really appreciate that.