Be Aware!

Jack is in fake bar country. Most of the bar-facades to the east only serve soda, and most of those to the west only serve pop, so they are not real bars. They do, however, look rather like bars from the outside. Jack is unaware of this problem. Fortunately the problem does not affect him, for the bar he is in front of is really a bar, and he plans to go in for a drink.

Question: Is Jack aware that he’s standing in front of a bar?

Jill and Jane are talking about Jane’s philosophy of sport class. It is common belief between the two of them that the only undergrads enrolled in the class are Manny, David and Bronson. Jane says that all the undergrads in her class are Red Sox fans. While it is true that Manny, David and Bronson are Red Sox fans, unbeknownst to Jane, Alex just enrolled in the class, and Alex is a Yankees fan. Jill believes Jane, and hence forms the beliefs that each of the students she thinks are in Jane’s class are Red Sox fans.

Question: Is Jill aware that Bronson is a Red Sox fan?

Answers below the fold.

I think the answer to both questions is pretty clearly _yes_. But Williamson is committed to the answer in both cases being _no_. He endorses the premises of the following argument. (I’ll just do Jack’s case, though Jill’s is similar.)

1. Jill does not know that Bronson is a Red Sox fan, for she inferred this from a false premise.
2. Knowledge is awareness; i.e. S knows that p iff S is aware that p.
C. Jill is not aware that Bronson is a Red Sox fan.

The claim that 2 is true is in “his book synopsis”:http://www.blackwell-synergy.com/links/doi/10.1111/j.1468-0149.2004.0356a.x/full/

bq. Awareness is knowledge: to be aware of something that it has some property is to know of it that it has that property.

It seems he has to say this, because of the following argument.

3. Awareness is a factive mental state.
4. If S Xs p, where X is a factive mental state, then S knows that p.
5. If S knows that p, then S is aware that p.
C*. Knowledge is awareness.

I don’t really see what arguments one could make against 3 that don’t tell against the claim that knowledge is a factive mental state. Williamson makes 4 a key part of his account of knowledge, and 5 looks fairly plausible. (And in any case is irrelevant to the argument we’re using above – 1, 3 and 4 suffice to entail C.) So he should accept 2.

In any case, I think it’s plausible that 2 is true. The quote from Williamson has a fairly solid ring of truth to it.

But intuitions about awareness seem different from intuitions about knowledge. It is much harder to motivate scepticism about awareness. Putting any kind of stress on _aware_ does not change intuitions in the way that stress on _know_ does. Changing the context doesn’t seem to affect judgments of awareness the way it affects judgments of knowledge. I’m not sure whether changing the stakes affects who we say is aware of what.

In short, there seems to be a path in for dedicated anti-sceptics here. (For current purposes people who deny Jack and Jill knowledge will get thrown in with the sceptics.) For we can turn Williamson’s argument around.

6. Jill is aware that Bronson is a Red Sox fan.
7. Knowledge is awareness.
C**. Jill knows that Bronson is a Red Sox fan.