Probabilistic Knowledge , by Sarah Moss

Abstract

Probabilistic Knowledge is ambitious, original, and extremely wide-ranging. From epistemic modals to imprecise probabilities, from the content of beliefs to the knowledge norm on action, from loose speech to peer disagreement to statistical evidence to the relation between credence and full belief, Sarah Moss discusses a huge array of cutting edge issues in epistemology and the philosophy of mind and language. Tying the discussion together is the titular phenomenon of probabilistic knowledge: the knowledge we attribute with phrases such as ‘He knew that they might be home’ or ‘She realized her phone was probably in the car’. Moss argues that such knowledge involves not an ordinary belief, but a credence (roughly: a positive credence that they are home in the first case, a high credence that her phone is in the car in the second) – and that, so understood, the notion is both coherent and theoretically fruitful. The case is made in three parts. Chapters 1–4 develop and defend the underlying philosophy of mind and language, on which words such as ‘probably’ and ‘might’ let us directly express credences. Chapters 5–7 motivate and defend Moss’s account of sentences like ‘She knew her phone was probably in the car’ as attributing credences that constitute knowledge. And chapters 8–10 apply the idea that credences can constitute knowledge to a variety of topics.