DESDEMONA’S HANDKERCHIEF, ENGINEERED KNOWLEDGE AND JUSTIFICATION
DAN O’BRIENABSTRACT. This paper discusses cases of engineered knowledge. These involve a devious speaker making use of a hearer’s prejudiced ways of thinking in order to transmit knowledge to them. Such hearers acquire testimonial knowledge but their thoughts are not justified. Knowledge does not therefore entail justification: one can know that p without having a justified belief that p. The traditional tripartite analysis of knowledge should therefore be rejected, as should the ‘knowledge first’ epistemologies of Timothy Williamson (2000) and Alexander Bird (2007). All of these accounts either assume or argue that knowledge entails justification it does not.