The Practical Origins of Epistemic Contextualism

My aim in this paper is to motivate and defend a version of epistemic contextualism; a version, that is, of what came to be called attributor or ascriber contextualism. I will begin by outlining, in the first part, what I take to be the basic idea of and motivation behind the version of epistemic contextualism that I favor. In the second part, a couple of examples will be presented in order to illustrate the contextualist point. Since epistemic (ascriber) contextualists commonly claim that knowledge ascriptions are context-sensitive, the third part of the paper will be concerned with the phenomenon of context-sensitivity at a more general level. A more detailed inquiry into the context-sensitivity natural language expressions exhibit will prove helpful in order to counter the objection that postulating context-sensitivity in the case of knowledge ascriptions is an ad-hoc-maneuver. Given that epistemic contextualism is partly an epistemological thesis, party a linguistic thesis, the remainder of the paper will be devoted to the question of how to semantically model the kind of context-sensitivity exhibited by knowledge ascriptions. The upshot will be that there are two different ways of semantically accommodating the context-sensitivity at issue. Both call for a more or less drastic departure from epistemological and semantic orthodoxy.

Episteme

The ambiguity theory of ‘knows’ is the view that ‘knows’ and its cognates have more than one sense, and that which sense of ‘knows’ is used in a knowledge ascription or denial determines, in part, the meaning (and as a result the truth conditions) of that knowledge ascription or denial. In this paper, I argue that the ambiguity theory of ‘knows’ ought to be taken seriously by those drawn to epistemic contextualism. In doing so I first argue that the ambiguity theory of ‘knows’ is a distinct view from epistemic contextualism. Second, I provide independent philosophical and linguistic considerations to motivate the ambiguity theory. Third, I argue that the ambiguity theory has the same central, generally agreed upon virtues ascribed to epistemic contextualism (namely, the ability to solve certain persistent epistemological problems relating to skeptical arguments and the ability to preserve the truth of most of our everyday, ordinary usages of ‘knows’ and its cognates). Finally, I provide an ambiguity-theory-friendly account of why contextualism may be initially appealing, and why this shouldn’t dissuade us from taking the ambiguity theory seriously nonetheless.

Metaphilosophy, 2015

Contextualism in epistemology has traditionally been understood as the view that `know' functions semantically like an indexical term, encoding different contents in contexts with different epistemic standards. But the indexical hypothesis about `know' faces a range of objections. This paper explores an alternative version of contextualism on which `know' is a semantically stable term, and the truth-conditional variability in knowledge claims is a matter of pragmatic enrichment. The central idea is that in contexts with stringent epistemic standards, knowledge claims are narrowed: `know' is used in such contexts to make assertions about particularly demanding types of knowledge. The resulting picture captures all of the intuitive data that motivate traditional contextualism while sidestepping the controversial linguistic thesis at its heart. After developing the view, I show in detail how it avoids one influential linguistic objection to traditional contextualism concerning indirect speech reports, and then answer an objection concerning the unavailability of certain types of clarification speeches.

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2015

In epistemology, contextualism is the view that the truth-conditions of knowledge claims vary with the contexts in which those claims are made. This article surveys the main arguments for contextualism, describes a variety of different approaches to developing the view, and discusses how contextualism has been used to treat the problem of radical skepticism. It then presents and responds to a range of objections to contextualism arising from aspects of the linguistic behavior of the word `know' and its cognates. Finally, several alternatives to contextualism are presented, including traditional invariantism, subject-sensitive invariantism, and relativism.

According to the thesis of epistemological contextualism, the truth conditions of sentences of the form 'S knows that P' and 'S does not know that P' vary according to the context in which they are uttered, where this variation is due to the semantics of 'knows'. Among the linguistic data that have been offered in support of epistemological contextualism are cases that are ordinary in the sense that they involve a consideration neither of skeptical hypotheses nor of skeptical arguments. Both Stewart Cohen and Keith DeRose, contextualism's two most prominent proponents, provide such cases. In a recent paper, DeRose goes so far as to claim that such cases provide the best grounds for accepting contextualism. 1 In what follows, we argue that these cases do not support contextualism. In fact, they point in the direction of epistemological invariantism-the thesis that sentences of the form 'S knows that P' and 'S does not know that P' do not vary according to the context in which they are uttered.

The contextualistic account for the semantic behaviour of the term "know" -a position labelled as "epistemic contextualism" -combined with the widely accepted idea that "know" is a factive verb seems to lead to a very unpleasant conclusion: epistemic contextualism is inconsistent. In section 1 we first examine some aspects of the epistemological meaning of the contextualist semantics of "know", then in section 2 we sketch the problem which leads to the supposed inconsistency of epistemic contextualism and in section 3 we analyse some solutions that have been proposed to solve the problem which are, in our view, unsatisfactory. In section 4 we present our attempt of solution. 32 On this point Brendel seems to agree with Baumann, see pp. 45-47. 33 Baumann (2008) pag. 583.

Modeling and Using Context, 2005

Philosophical Studies, 2000

The paper I gave at the conference has subsequently split into two papers. The other descendant of the original paper (Stanley (forthcoming)) focuses on developing a noncontextualist account of knowledge that captures the intuitive data as well as contextualism. Discussion with the participants at the conference at the University of Massachusetts was very helpful. I should single out John Hawthorne and my commentator Barbara Partee for special mention; e-mails with Stewart Cohen since then have also been invaluable. I am also indebted for discussion to Forthcoming in Philosophical Studies Contextualism in epistemology is the doctrine that the proposition expressed by a knowledge attribution relative to a context is determined in part by the standards of justification salient in that context. The (non-skeptical) contextualist allows that in some context c, a speaker may truly attribute knowledge at a time of a proposition p to Hannah, despite her possession of only weak inductive evidence for the truth of that proposition. Relative to another context, someone may make the very same knowledge attribution to Hannah, yet be speaking falsely, because the epistemic standards in that context are higher. The reason this is possible, according to the contextualist, is that the two knowledge attributions express different propositions.

2007

Epistemic contextualism (EC) is primarily a semantic view, viz. the view that ‘knowledge’-ascriptions can change their contents with the conversational context. To be more precise, EC is the view that the predicate ‘know’ has an unstable Kaplan character, i.e. a character that does not map all contexts on the same content. According to EC, ‘know’ is thus an indexical expression. Notwithstanding this purely linguistic characterisation of EC, contextualists have traditionally argued that their views have considerable philosophical impact, this being due to the alleged fact that their linguistic views about ‘know’ provide the resources for a resolution of sceptical puzzles. In this paper I will address an objection to EC claiming that, as a linguistic view about the term ‘know’, EC cannot be of any epistemological significance.