Wesley Buckwalter

In epistemology, fake-barn thought experiments are often taken to be intuitively clear cases in which a justified true belief does not qualify as knowledge. We report a study designed to determine whether members of the general public share this intuition. The data suggest that while participants are less inclined to attribute knowledge in fake-barn cases than in unproblematic cases of knowledge, they nonetheless do attribute knowledge to protagonists in fake-barn cases. Moreover, the intuition that fake-barn cases do count as knowledge is negatively correlated with age; older participants are less likely than younger participants to attribute knowledge in fake-barn cases. We also found that increasing the number of defeaters (fakes) does not decrease the inclination to attribute knowledge.

Previous research in experimental philosophy has suggested that moral judgments can influence the ordinary application of a number of different concepts, including attributions of knowledge. But should epistemologists care? The present set of studies demonstrate that this basic effect can be extended to overturn intuitions in some of the most theoretically central thought experiments in contemporary epistemology: Gettier cases. Furthermore, experiment 3 shows that this effect is unlikely to be mediated by a simple desire to blame, suggesting that a correct psychological account of ordinary knowledge attribution may include moral judgment.

A critique of inferences from “is” to “ought” plays a central role in Elqayam & Evans' (E&E's) defense of descriptivism. However, the reflective equilibrium strategy described by Goodman and embraced by Rawls, Cohen, and many others poses an important challenge to that critique. Dual-system theories may help respond to that challenge.