This is certainly a controversial question, but we address it in section 4.1 of this paper One key piece of evidence is that non-human primates have an ability to track a certain kind of factive state that they are unable to track in cases that look a whole lot like Gettier cases

OK, maybe I was wrong about this, but just to clarify, the claim in our paper is: There are certain complex things that human beings can do but other primates cannot (including belief attribution), but knowledge attribution is "simple" in the sense that other primates could also do it

This is a great point in general, but I’m not sure it applies here. Some of the philosophers making these claims are very explicit about the fact that they are trying to say something about ordinary language or the ordinary concept of knowledge 

Good point. We never seem to succeed at analyzing any concept into other concepts, so if we want to claim that a certain view is “too complex,” we would need to have some way of making sense of that claim without giving an analysis of knowledge

But I don't mean that you should take a look at our work before commenting! Even if you don't look at all at that paper, I would love to hear your thoughts

Ha! Since we don't have a successful analysis for any ordinary concept of philosophical interest, it is extremely unlikely we will ever have an analysis of the concept of knowledge But we can still discover truths about the concept! I would be really interested to hear any thoughts you might have

I am fascinated by that question, but I don't know the answer One possible answer would be that it is a sociological process of the type Cummins describes in this famous passage, where agreeing with certain claims becomes an entrance requirement for even participating in the discussion

What we see with this experimental work on the concept of knowledge is very different from what we see with work on other concepts Just in this one specific case, philosophers seem to talking about something very complex that is wildly out of step with the (much simpler) ordinary concept

Not only do philosophers attribute knowledge differently from ordinary folks, they attribute knowledge differently from *all other academics*

In fact, people are happy to attribute knowledge of a proposition even when they would not agree that the person *believes* this proposition

Similarly, people are happy to attribute knowledge in Gettier cases when the outcome is something morally bad

There are a variety of different kinds of cases that philosophers call “Gettier cases.” Of these, there are some where ordinary folks are happy to attribute knowledge People only deny knowledge in a specific type of Gettier case

In “high stakes” cases, ordinary people are still inclined to attribute knowledge In fact, they attribute knowledge even in the exact high stakes cases that have been most discussed in philosophy (e.g., “bank cases”)

People tend to attribute knowledge in what philosophers call “fake barn” cases These cases don’t satisfy the “safety” condition — meaning that people are happy to attribute knowledge even when this condition is not satisfied

What the studies keep showing, again and again, is that ordinary folks are happy to attribute knowledge in cases where philosophers would deny knowledge The ordinary concept *does not* seem to involve all of the complex conditions that philosophers have invoked in their theories

There has been a huge amount of experimental philosophy research on the concept of KNOWLEDGE This research finds that the ordinary concept doesn’t work at all the way philosophers said it does A thread with some examples: 🧵