Knowledge and Practical Interests

Abstract The thesis of this book is that whether or not someone knows a proposition at a given time is in part determined by his or her practical interests, i.e., by how much is at stake for that person at that time. Thus, whether a true belief is knowledge is not merely a matter of supporting beliefs or reliability; in the case of knowledge, practical rationality and theoretical rationality are intertwined. This thesis, called Interest-Relative Invariantism about knowledge, is defended against alternative accounts of the phenomena that motivate it, such as the claim that knowledge attributions are linguistically context-sensitive and the claim that the truth of a knowledge claim is somehow relative to the…