Awareness and the Substructure of Knowledge

Abstract

The expression ‘S is aware of the fact that p’ is a commonplace, not at all a philosopher’s term of art. It is often used to criticize, excuse, admonish, and inform others. Such uses of the expression presuppose the existence of a state of awareness that one can be in or fail to be in with regard to some fact. Here lies the phenomenon of factual awareness. It is conventional in epistemology to treat ‘S is aware of the fact that p’ as either expressing the same thought as ‘S knows that p’ or at least entailing it. Learning of the failure of conventional views is often both surprising and theoretically fruitful. This book provides a comprehensive case against the view that factual awareness just is knowledge or even essentially related to knowledge: factual awareness is not identical to, and it does not entail, knowing, being in a position to know, or being capable of knowing. It provides a systematic exploration of the relation between knowledge and factual awareness, arguing that knowledge is but one species of factual awareness and that we can understand the possession of objective reasons, the normativity of knowledge, and the nature of knowledge in terms of factual awareness. In this way, the state of factual awareness is, structurally and substantively, a more basic type of state than knowledge. If correct, this undermines a number of ways in which knowledge has been regarded as ‘first’ in recent epistemology.

Ignorance and awareness

“…He argues only that the relevant notion must exclude a significant degree of chance or coincidence. Silva (2021Silva ( , 2022Silva ( , 2023 agrees, pointing out that reliabilist virtue-theoretic conditions and safety-theoretic conditions can effectively be generalized to apply to the total class of representational states, not just belief states. For one could take any non-accidentality condition applied to belief (a special case of representation) for the purposes of understanding knowledge, and then take that knowledgerelevant non-accidentality condition and apply it to representational states more generally (e.g.…”

“…For example, we can first come to know (i) that p and (ii) that p entails q, and after, and in response, later come to believe q. This is an entirely ordinary way in which we update our beliefs (Silva 2021(Silva , 2023Wedgwood 2014).…”

“…A second concrete proposal for awareness has been advanced by Michael Huemer (2001:51-57) and Paul Silva (2021Silva ( , 2022Silva ( , 2023. Both hold that being aware of the fact that p is non-accidentally representing the fact that p: Awareness = Non-Accidental True Representation (A = NATR): S is aware of the fact that p iff p, S represents the fact that p, and S's representation of that fact is suitably non-accidental.…”

“…One could bridge these theses quite easily by arguing that one is in a position to know p if and only if one is non‐accidentally related to the fact that p . Silva (2023: Chapters 4 and 5) undermines this equivalence. But we will here remain neutral on it.…”

“…an object or fact) that is based on your awareness of something else (another object or fact) (cf. Silva 2023: Chapter 2). To illustrate, recall Population Statistics from above.…”