Author Description

Anglophone epistemologists have devoted a great deal of attention to the English word 'know' and to English sentences used to attribute knowledge. Many contemporary epistemologists, including contextualists and subject-sensitive invariantists, are concerned with the truth-conditions of 'S knows that p, ' or the proposition it expresses. However, there are over 6000 languages in the world. Thus, it is not clear why we should think that subtle facts about the English verb 'know' have important implications for epistemology. Are the properties of the English word 'know' and sentences of the form 'S knows that p' shared in their translations into most or all other languages? This, what has been termed the universality thesis, raises many novel questions in the field of epistemology, whether it turns out to be true or false.