Knowledge and Practical Interests

This book presents a startling & provocative claim about knowledge--that whether or not someone knows a proposition at a given time is in part determined by his or her practical interests. Whether a true belief is knowledge is not merely a matter of supporting beliefs or reliability; in the case of knowledge, practical rationality & theoretical rationality are intertwined. The author defends this thesis against alternative accounts of the phenomena that motivate it, such as the claim that knowledge attributions are linguistically context-sensitive, & the claim that the truth of a knowledge claim is somehow relative to the person making the claim.