forum 1, week of Jan 8, Dretske

I agree. Dretske's examples of relevance seem self-defeating at times. The Zebra case is especially troubling because it involves intentional deception in a case where there is usually no intent to deceive. The Zebra-painter is almost as evil as Descartes' demons. The reliance on this sort of example is emblematic of a deeper problem in his theory in that it it is too exclusive and unnecessarily limits knowledge to a subset of what we usually define knowledge to include. Too much error-avoidance leads to unnecessary ignorance.