Epistemic Closure, Home Truths, and Easy Philosophy

(Forthcoming in The Journal of Philosophy)

Walter Horn

Abstract

In spite of the intuitiveness of epistemic closure, there has been a stubborn stalemate regarding
whether it is true, largely because some of the “Moorean” things we seem to know easily (like that
I’m sitting on a green chair) seem clearly to entail “heavyweight” philosophical things that we
apparently cannot know easily—or perhaps even at all (like that I’m not actually lying in bed
dreaming). In this paper, I will show that two widely accepted facts about what we do and don’t
know—facts with which any minimally acceptable understanding of knowledge must comport—are
jointly inconsistent with the truth of CLR. The proof works by supposing the truth of
“Categorialism,” a thesis about the relation between basic categories and common nouns and
predicates, which is itself a heavyweight claim that cannot be easily known to be either true or
false.