Abstract

The appealing idea that knowledge is best understood as a kind of achievement faces significant criticisms, among them Matthew Chrisman’s charge that the whole project rests on a kind of ontological category mistake. Chrisman argues that while knowledge and belief are states, the kind of normativity found in, for example, Sosa’s famous ‘Triple-A’ structure of assessment is only applicable to performances, end-directed events that unfold over time, and never to states. What is overlooked, both by Chrisman and those he criticizes, is a whole range of projects, those like friendship, health, marriage, and sobriety, where the end is not distinct from our pursuit of it. I suggest that such ‘inner projects’ are in fact stative achievements and thus provide a different sort of model for thinking about knowledge as an achievement. Reconceiving the project along these lines also helps to solve another outstanding problem, the charge that being an achievement is not necessary for knowledge because some knowledge, especially testimonial knowledge, is come by with little or no effort