ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to refine the argument of the previous chapter by suggesting that we could view Iago’s recontextualization of Othello’s erstwhile knowledge not as a case of his introducing new facts, or of his drawing Othello’s attention to facts that he had not noticed, but rather as a case of Iago’s changing Othello’s conception of the appropriate standards to be applied in assessing his (Othello’s) epistemic status. In effect Iago raises the epistemic bar, in the sense of getting Othello to think that his former ‘knowledge’ of Desdemona’s fidelity did not meet suitably high standards, and so did not really count as knowledge. Othello then makes the illogical but natural jump from ‘I do not know that Desdemona is loyal, as I thought I did’ to ‘It is not actually true that she is loyal’. There is an interesting convergence here between Iago’s method and that of the radical sceptic, who works by suggesting that our ordinary standards of assessing knowledge claims are too low, and that when we apply suitably high standards we turn out not to know that certain radically sceptical possibilities (such as that one is dreaming, or is a brain in a vat) do not obtain.
