The Information-Theoretic Account of Knowledge, Closure and the KK Thesis

Abstract

Abstract One common objection to Dretske’s Information Theoretic Account of Knowledge (ITAK) is that it violates closure. I show that it does not, and that extant arguments attempting to establish that it does rely instead on the KK thesis. That thesis does fail for ITAK. I show moreover that an interesting consequence of ITAK obeying the closure principle after all is that on this view if skepticism is false, we can have a great deal of empirical knowledge, but it is in principle impossible to know that skepticism is false. In short, a proper understanding of how ITAK closes off the KK thesis shows that we can 1) take seriously the skeptic, we can 2) respond to her appropriately that we do have knowledge and we can 3) keep closure.