Silva (2023) Awareness and the Substructure of Knowledge Ch. 1

Silva Jr, Paul (2023). Awareness and the Substructure of Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

 

1. Towards an Awareness-First Epistemology

1) The expression ‘aware of the fact that’ is a commonplace

① criticize

‘You were aware of the fact that it was wrong, but you did it anyway!’

② excuse

‘I’m sorry, I wasn’t aware of the fact that you would be hurt by my action.’

③ admonish

‘You should be aware of the fact that you can easily offend Germans by making casual jokes about their football.'

④ inform

Were we to suspect a person of being ignorant of an important detail we might naturally seek to inform them of both their ignorance and the important detail with a question about awareness: ‘Are you aware of the fact that the borders have been closed?’

When these expressions are used for the purposes of criticizing, excusing, admonishing, and informing they are meant to be understood straightforwardly in terms of sentence-meaning. Such uses 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.

The Awareness Question. What is it to be aware of a fact, and what is the place of such awareness in epistemology?

 

2) The differences between the awareness of facts and knowledge of facts

It is difficult to hear the difference between someone claiming that ‘I know that she’s home’ and ‘I am aware of the fact that she’s home.’

① The first way is anchored in ordinary language and involves reflection on specific modes of factual awareness that can fall short of knowledge.

Bernecker’s (2010) seminal work on memory: remembering that p is distinct from having memorial knowledge that p.

Many have argued that seeing that p is distinct from paradigmatic instances of visual knowledge

A priori insight that p and p’s being self-evident to an agent

Why?

Remembering that p / seeing that p / A priori insight that p and p’s being self-evident to an agent
does not
(1) require belief that p
(2) ultima facie justification to believe that p
(3) absence of all forms of knowledge-compromising luck

According to Silva, those are a way of being aware of the fact that p.

Therefore, it follows that those are a way of being aware of the fact that p, which is distinct from knowing that p.

② The second way of isolating a concept of factual awareness which does not immediately collapse into knowledge involves using ‘factual awareness’ to refer to a relation that is a modest generalization of knowledge.

on virtually all accounts of knowledge,
(1) part of what it is to know that p is to have a non-accidentally true belief that p. Beliefs that are non-accidentally true are beliefs that are held or formed in such a way that their truth is not a matter of chance in some epistemically relevant sense (e.g., A belief ’s being reliably formed, or being safely formed, or being sensitively formed, or being justified by the facts one possess).
(2) knowledge is a kind of non-accidental true representation. This is because knowledge is a kind of belief state and belief states are representational states