Orthodoxy in the contemporary debate on knowledge ascriptions holds that the truth‐value of knowledge ascriptions is purely a matter of truth‐relevant factors. One familiar challenge to orthodoxy comes from intuitive practical factor effects . But practical factor effects turn out to be hard to confirm in experimental studies, and where they have been confirmed, they may seem easy to explain away. We suggest a novel experimental paradigm to show that practical factor effects exist. It trades on the idea that people (...) retract knowledge attributions when practical factors shift. We also explain why the resulting data raise a serious challenge to orthodoxy. (shrink)

This paper offers a novel account of practical factor effects on knowledge attributions that is consistent with the denial of contextualism, relativism and pragmatic encroachemt. The account goes as follows. Knowledge depends on factors like safety, reliability or probability. In many cases, it is uncertain just how safe, how reliably formed or how probable the target proposition is. This means that we have to estimate these quantities in order to form knowledge judgements. Such estimates of uncertain quantities are independently known (...) to be affected by pragmatic factors. When overestimation is costlier than underestimation, for instance, we tend to underestimate the relevant quantity to avoid greater losses. On the suggested account, high stakes and other pragmatic factors induce such “asymmetric loss functions” on quantities like safety, reliability and probability. This skews our estimates of these quantities and thereby our judgements about knowledge. The resulting theory is an error-theory, but one that rationlizes the error in question. (shrink)