The Case for Contextualism - Knowledge, Skepticism, and Context, Volume 1
Keith DeRose
Language: English
Pages: 303
ISBN: 2:00254451
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"This volume will be of particular benefit to graduate students and researchers looking to gain initial sympathetic familiarity with contextualism; it is also clear and accessible enough to be suitable for advanced undergraduates. This book will be among the first resources I turn to when students ask for an introduction to "knows" contextualism."
-Jonathan Ichikawa, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
Being Human in a Consumer Society (Classical and Contemporary Social Theory)
form of invariantism). For, recalling our statement of invariantism from back in section 1 (but now emphasizing a clause key to SSI’s counting as a form of invariantism), according to SSI, like other forms of invariantism, given S’s situation, there’s a single set of standards which, at least as far as truth-conditions go, govern any speaker’s assertion about whether or not S ‘knows’, regardless of those speakers’ conversational contexts. Thus, if two speakers are talking about the same S and the
for the relevant claims are in fact just varying conditions for when it would be in some sense appropriate or warranted to assert the relevant sentences—while the truth-conditions of the relevant claims remain fixed through these variations in warranted assertability conditions. 12. A Brief History of Contextualism Theories according to which there are two senses of ‘know(s)’—a ‘low’, ‘weak’, or ‘ordinary’ sense on the one hand, and a ‘high’, ‘strong’, or ‘philosophical’ sense, which is much more
truthconditions of knowledge attributions vary with context in the relevant way. KAA yields an answer to the Generality Objection by providing the contextualist with an alternative and, as it turns out, superior explanation for the harmony the Generality Objector points out: Since, as KAA dictates, the relevant warranted assertability condition for the assertion of the simple ‘p’ is that the speaker know that p according to the epistemic standards that govern her assertion, as those standards for
false to say of married men that they are bachelors, and it seems true to say of them that they are not bachelors; it seems false to describe false beliefs as cases of knowledge, and it seems true to say that believers of falsehoods do not know what they believe. So there appears to be no problem in these cases, making it all the more problematic to claim that in fact there is a big problem here, with the intuitions of both falsehood and truth being mistaken. Second, and closely related, having
this view, when the personally indicated content of two speakers in a single conversation diverges—or at least when they diverge by as much as happens in our debate with the skeptic and her opponent—the scoreboard explodes: There is no correct score, and claims involving the relevant term are neither true nor false. We are, after all, considering a conversation that is quite defective. Speakers engaged in conversation should adjust to one another’s score so they are meaning the same thing by the
