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There is a widespread and largely unchallenged assumption within philosophy that the word 'normal' is ambiguous: i.e. that it can mean different things in different contexts. This assumption appears in work within topics as varied as the philosophy of biology, medicine, justification, causation, and more. In this paper I argue that we currently lack any independent reason for adopting such an assumption. The reason that would most likely be offered in its favour requires us to ignore an alternative and equally plausible explanation for the seeming variety of different meanings that 'normal' is taken to have. Meanwhile, the well-known conjunction reduction test for ambiguity provides no evidence for the ambiguity of 'normal', and in fact suggests that maintaining this ambiguity claim is more difficult than has been initially supposed. Therefore, with the way things stand at present, it should not be assumed without argument that 'normal' is an ambiguous term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ambiguity theory of 'knows' is the view that 'knows' and its cognates have more than one propositional sense – i.e. more than one sense that can properly be used in 'knows that' etc. constructions. Given that most of us are 'intuitive invariantists' – i.e. most of us initially have the intuition that 'knows' is univocal – defenders of the ambiguity theory need to offer an explanation for the semantic blindness present if 'knows' is in fact ambiguous. This paper is an attempt to offer such an explanation. Section 1 contains a general argument for the ubiquity of semantic blindness for ambiguous; the upshot being that semantic blindness for the ambiguity of 'knows' is thus unsurprising as a result. And Section 2 offers more specific arguments for why 'knows' is the type of ambiguous word we're very unlikely to quickly recognize is ambiguous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]