The entailment thesis holds that knowledge entails belief. Most epistemologists
take it to be obvious. Now, there are two ways to argue against the entailment
thesis: first, one can argue for a particular account of knowledge or belief such that
the entailment thesis does not hold; second, one can provide an intuitive example
of knowledge without belief. The second strategy was employed by Colin
Radford. In Radford’s proposed counterexample, Jean—a French Canadian—is
being quizzed by Tom on English history. The former earnestly avows that he
knows nothing about English history. Jean requires prompts to answer questions,
and even when he answers them he does so with hesitation. Jean is fairly certain
that his answers are wrong. At the end, Jean gets five out of ten questions right.
One of the questions he is asked is: when did Queen Elizabeth die? Jean answers
(E): ‘Queen Elizabeth died in 1603.’ When told by Tom that his answer is right,
Jean reports that he feels he might have “picked that up on a Shakespeare course
or somewhere.”
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