PRAGMATIC AND IDEALIZED MODELS OF KNOWLEDGE AND IGNORANCE
Douglas Walton · 2016
It is a pervasive assumption in recent analytical philosophy that knowledge can be defined as a modality representing a rational agent's true and consistent beliefs. Such views are based on rationality assumptions. One is that knowledge can only consist of true propositions. This way of speaking is sharply at odds with the way we speak about knowledge, for example, in computing, where a so-called knowledge base can be a database, that is, a set of data that has been collected and is thought to consist of true propositions, even though, realistically speaking, many of them might later be shown to be false or untenable. In this study, opposed to the truth-implying