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Accomplishing Accomplishment

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Abstract

The concepts of knowledge and accomplishment are duals. There are many parallels between them. In this paper I discuss the "AA" thesis, which is dual to the well known KK thesis. The KK thesis claims that if someone knows something, then she knows that she knows it. This is generally thought to be false, and there are powerful reasons for rejecting it. The AA thesis claims that if someone accomplishes something, then she accomplishes that she accomplishes it. I argue that this, too, is false, and that the reasons it is false parallel reasons for the falsity of the KK thesis.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to audiences in May 2011 when I read an ancestor of this paper at Bristol, Geneva, and Bled. I thought a lot about the comments of Andrew Pyle and James Ladyman. Later that summer a correspondence with James Cargile over Morton 2011 led to his giving me extremely helpful comments on a draft of this paper. I do not have answers to all his doubts.

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Correspondence to Adam Morton.

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Morton, A. Accomplishing Accomplishment. Acta Anal 27, 1–8 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-011-0142-0

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-011-0142-0

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