Abstract: The intuitive inconsistency of concessive knowledge attributions (CKAs) has become one of the puzzles in epistemology and philosophy of language. This allegedly “sensed” inconsistency has also become a main argument by means of which contextualists attack invariantism and infallibilists criticize fallibilism over recent years. Nevertheless, by making a detailed analysis of the crux of CKAs and following the approaches of epistemic gradualism and pragmatic invariantism, we can prove that a knowledgeascribing sentence conveys the implicature that the ascriber is (partly) certain or that he/she can eliminate relevant alternatives, and such implicatures may be cancelled by a concessive clause. Further, the apparent inconsistency of this type of sentences may be explained away by either filling in degree indicators or interpreting “know” as loose use. The acceptability of CKAs has also found evidence in our recent experimental study.

Key words: epistemic gradualism, assertability conditions, concessive knowledge attribution, implicature, pragmatic invariantism