 Sometimes when people are very confident of something that turns out to be wrong, we use the word “knows” to describe their situation. Many people expected Clinton to win the election. Speaking loosely, one might even say that many people “knew” that Clinton would win the election—until she lost. Hazlett (2010) argues on the basis of data like this that “knows” is not a factive  verb.[2]  Hazlett’s diagnosis is deeply controversial; most epistemologists will treat sentences like “I knew that Clinton was going to win” as a kind of exaggeration—as not literally true.