A Defeater for the Incredulous Stare against Extrinsic Divine Knowledge

Proponents of the Thomistic doctrine of Divine simplicity often rely upon partially extrinsic grounds for Divine knowledge in order to explain how propositions of form "God knows that p," where p is some tensed proposition, can change truth value without any intrinsic change in God. Such reliance is often met with an incredulous stare from non-classical theists, who insist that Divine knowledge of this kind isn't worthy of the name "knowledge," possibly resting on a intuition that knowledge is a mental state, and that surely mental states of all things are purely intrinsic.

But this incredulous stare faces a devastating undercutting defeater: the partial extrinsicality of creaturely knowledge, except for knowledge of truths without truthmakers and self-knowledge. For all knowledge is factive, and commonly, the fact in question is extrinsic to the knower and constitutes the truthmaker for the proposition known. So, for example, when I know that the cat is on the mat, my knowledge is grounded partially in the truth of the proposition that the cat is on the mat, and the truth of this proposition is itself grounded in the fact (or state of affairs, or whatever one's favorite kind of truthmaker is) of the cat's being on the mat. Thus, by the transitivity of partial grounding, my knowledge is partially grounded in the wholly extrinsic fact of the cat's being on the mat, and therefore is partially extrinsic to me. Thus, whenever any person, God or creature, knows a proposition with a truthmaker that is extrinsic to the knower, that knowledge is partially grounded in something extrinsic to the knower. So extrinsic knowledge is, contrary to the incredulous stare, quite common and includes paradigmatic cases of knowledge, such as knowing that the cat is on the mat or that the Sun is larger than the Earth.