Président de séance : Anouk Barberousse (Sorbonne Université)
We know that Holmes doesn’t exist. Yet we seem also to have lots of iffy knowledge of the form: if Holmes exists, Holmes is F (Yablo 2020). I will consider the question how best to think about this kind of conditional knowledge, mostly by trying to make semantic sense of the associated iffy knowledge ascriptions. There are at least two issues. One is a very general one about iffy knowledge: What is it to know if p, then q, when p is already known not to be a live possibility? The second is tied up with existence and reference particularly: How best to think the semantic contribution of an embedded name in nontrivially true ascriptions of the form “A knows that if x exists, x is F”, particularly in the case where there is no x and A knows it?
Seth Yalcin is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he is also a member of the Group in Logic and the Methodology of Science. He works primarily in the philosophy of language.
