Abstract

Some philosophers have claimed that there is knowledge from falsehood (KFF, in short), i.e., inferential knowledge that involves a relevant false premise. The main thesis of this paper is that there are no standard cases of KFF. By ‘standard cases’ we mean cases in which the subject employs a measurement procedure in order to determine the value of some quantity, such as the time or the number of people present in a room. If knowledge is attained at all, it is attained by inference not from a false premise but, instead, from two pieces of reflective knowledge. A brief look at putative non-standard cases of KFF reveals that they can be explained away in a different way, albeit a way that shares a common pattern with standard cases.