Knowledge, Practical Interests, and Rising Tides

Abstract

A variety of considerations indicate that whether one knows depends on what is at stake from a practical point of view, but this view has met with two serious objections. First, if we suppose that knowledge is tied to our practical interests, then it seems that what it takes to know should change, radically and implausibly, from case to case as our practical interests change. Second, there seems to be no fully satisfying way of explaining whose practical interests matter. We can think of the first of these problems for the idea that knowledge is sensitive to practical interests as the stability problem and the second as the whose stakes? problem. This chapter argues that by first clarifying the whose stakes? problem an answer to the stability problem naturally falls out.

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