By way of introduction, Kieran Healy mentions a few favoured philosopher bugging techniques. I wonder what it says about the disciplines that philosophers, at least philosophers I know, don’t know any sociologist bugging techniques. In fact, I couldn’t really think of any other discipline we instinctively bug. Our default attitude to a discipine is to either hero-worship (if the discipline is, e.g. physics) or somewhat contempuously ignore (did you know some universities still have English departments?). Hmmm…Kieran does mention that we aren’t the most socialised lot on the planet, and I guess that fits the available data.

Getting back to philosophy, and in the spirit of fishing for intuitions, how plausible do people find the principle that if S believes that ~p, then S does not know that p? This is implied by Lewis’s theory of knowledge, and it always struck me as fairly plausible, but I’ve been worrying that there are a few potential counterexamples. So one consequence of the view is that if S believes that Twain is an author, and believes that Clemens is not an author, and the second belief is the negation of the first belief (as on a Russellian account of belief), then S does not know that Twain is an author. The spirit of the idea is that there are several ways to defeat a claim to knowledge, and belief in the negation of the allegedly known proposition is always a defeater. In the abstract it sounds fairly plausible, but in the Clemens/Twain case it might be hard to sustain.