The problem of ESEE knowledge*

Abstract: Traditionally it has been thought that the moral valence of a proposi-tion is, strictly speaking, irrelevant to whether someone knows that the proposi-tion is true, and thus irrelevant to the truth-value of a knowledge ascription. On this view, it’s no easier to know, for example, that a bad thing will happen than that a good thing will happen (other things being equal). But a series of very sur-prising recent experiments suggest that this is actually not how we view know-ledge. On the contrary, people are much more willing to ascribe knowledge of a bad outcome. This is known as the epistemic side-effect effect (ESEE) and is a specific instance of a widely documented phenomenon, the side-effect effect (a.k.a. “the Knobe effect”), which is the most famous finding in experimental philosophy. In this paper, I report a new series of five experiments on ESEE and in the process accomplish three things. First, I confirm earlier findings on the ef-fect. Second, I show that the effect is virtually unlimited. Third, I introduce a new technique for detecting the effect, which potentially enhances its theoretical sig-nificance. In particular, my findings make it more likely, though they do not en-tail, that the effect genuinely reflects the way we think about and ascribe know-ledge, rather than being the result of a performance error. 1