7. Changes

In this chapter I respond to the frequently voiced objection that interest-relative theories lead to implausible verdicts about pairs of situations where knowledge is lost or gained due to what looks like an irrelevant feature of a situation. I have two responses to these objections. First, I argue that the intuitions are about what makes it the case that a person does or doesn’t know something, and the arguments from these examples moves too quickly from a claim about modal variation to a claim about making. The second response is, I think, more compelling, and draws on unpublished work by Nilanjan Das. Objections like the ones I’m discussing here over-generate. Every theory of how to avoid Gettier-style cases leads to pairs of cases where a person gains or loses knowledge depending on factors that seem ‘irrelevant’. So it’s not an objection to my view that it has the same consequences as every plausible theory of knowledge.