Some fun puzzles to think about.

_The Restaurant_
A group of us is trying to get to the restaurant. I know how to get from here to the bar, and Andy knows the way from the bar to the restaurant. And we’re both helpful sorts when it comes to information about directions. Do we, i.e. the group including me and Andy and a few others, know the way to the restaurant?

What if either Andy’s belief or mine is Gettierised – i.e. justified and true but acquired in a wacky way? (‘Wacky’ there is a technical term.)

_The Bodies_
Andy knows where all the French bodies are buried, and I know where all the German bodies are buried. It turns out, but neither of us know this, that all the bodies are French or German. Do we know where all the bodies are buried?[*]

What if someone joins our group who does know that all the bodies are French or German, but doesn’t know where any of them are? Does the group then know where all the bodies are buried? It might be surprising that we come to know where all the bodies are buried by being joined by a person who doesn’t know where any of the bodies are buried, but that seems to be the case.

_The Ignorant_
Go back to the restaurant case, and assume we made it to the bar. The group now expands to include George. And George insists at great length that the restaurant is north of the bar, even though Andy is insistent that it is south of the bar. Some of the group believes Andy, though a few are made hesitant. Does the group know where the restaurant is?

_The Unhelpful_
Much as we’d like to go to the restaurant, where we really want to go is the money-tree – the place where they give you money for simply walking in the door. George knows where the money-tree is, but he won’t tell this to any of us? Does the group know where the money-tree is?

Back in the real world, Andy and I were thinking about such cases, because we thought about writing about what it takes for a group to know something. Of course we probably have the kind of intuitions you only get from only ever talking about knowledge late night at philosophy conferences, and we don’t know that much about the existing literature. (We each know the literature backwards, but since we won’t talk about any of it _we_ don’t know what it says. Well, not really, but we’re interested in whether that is possible.) But we plan to have fun making it all up as we go along.

[*] There’s an ambiguity here that I should clear up. X knows where all the bodies are buried is ambiguous between the following two meanings.

1. For each body, X knows where it is buried.
2. X knows the universal proposition _All the bodies are buried here, here, … and here_.

I always mean 2 in what’s above. Here’s a useful heuristic for knowing that it’s 2 that’s being used. Say I’m worried about Andy finding the bodies. I’ve secured all the sites where I know bodies are buried. It turns out that’s all the sites, because I meet condition 1 here. But I’m still worried about Andy finding some buried bodies. Why? Because I don’t know where all the bodies are buried. I think that’s a good explanation, but it relies on the _second_ reading of _knows where all the bodies are buried_.