Nothing at Stake in Knowledge*
Yeonjeong Kim2017, Noûs
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Abstract
And finally to see if responses to Knowledge Attribution are due to protagonist projection, we asked: Strict Knowledge Attribution: In your personal opinion, which of the following sentences better describes Bob's situation? [Bob knows the bank will be open on Saturday./Bob thinks he knows the bank will be open on Saturday, but he doesn't actually know it will be open.] 1
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In Our Shoes or the Protagonist’s? Knowledge, Justification, and Projection
Oxford Studies In Experimental Philosophy, 2020
Sackris and Beebe show that many people seem willing to attribute knowledge in the absence of justification. Their results provide some reason to claim that the folk concept of knowledge does not treat justification as necessary for its deployment. This chapter provides some support for this claim. It does so by addressing an alternative account of Sackris and Beebe’s results—the possibility that the observed knowledge attributions stemmed from protagonist projection, a linguistic phenomenon in which the speaker uses words that the relevant protagonist might use to describe her own situation and the listener interprets the speaker accordingly. That said, caution is recommended. There are alternative possibilities regarding what drives knowledge attributions in cases of unjustified true belief that must be ruled out before much confidence is given to the claim that the folk concept of knowledge does not take justification to be necessary for its use.
Two Purposes of Knowledge Attribution and the Contextualism Debate
In this chapter, we follow Edward Craig's (1990) advice: ask what the concept of knowledge does for us and use our findings as clues about its application conditions. What a concept does for us is a matter of what we can do with it, and what we do with concepts is deploy them in thought and language. So, we will examine the purposes we have in attributing knowledge. This chapter examines two such purposes, agent-evaluation and informant-suggestion, and brings the results to bear on an important debate about the application conditions of the concept of knowledge—the debate between contextualists and their rivals. } The paper responds to arguments from Jessica Brown that there is nothing special about the use of 'knows' to criticize and defend action. Briefly, I respond that by using 'knows that p' in this context we close off a certain sort of objection to one's evaluation of the action -- the "epistemic" objection, according to which the agent doesn't have good enough evidence, strong enough grounds for p. For instance, if I say, "Bob should have taken a left back there, because he knew the restaurant was on Elm Street!," I close off the objection "but Bob didn't have good enough grounds for thinking it was on Elm." Contrast this with criticizing Bob's action by say8ing, "Bob should have taken a left because he had reason to believe it was on Elm Street." This doesn't close off responses of the form "well, he had good reason, but not good enough; he didn't want to take the risk." Such a response isn't always appropriate, but it sometimes is. Using 'knows' closes it off in a way that using 'has reason to believe' doesn't. Using 'knew p' closes it off in a way that merely using 'p' or 'he truly believed that p' doesn't.
Knowing the Facts: A Contrastivist Account of the Referential Opacity of Knowledge Attributions*
Springer eBooks, 2018
Knowing the Facts: a Contrastivist Account of the Referential Opacity of Knowledge Attributions 'I know' is supposed to express a relation, not between me and the sense of a proposition (like 'I believe') but between me and a fact. (Wittgenstein, On Certainty, § 90) Ordinary speakers of English, but also philosophers acting in their professional capacity, often describe agents as 'knowing the facts of the matter', characterise the outcome of our epistemic dealings with the world as 'knowledge of facts', and refer to what has successfully been established by inquiry as the 'known facts'. By using these and other such phrases, they seem to imply that knowledge is, at least in some cases, a relation to facts. However, in epistemological circles the type of knowledge that is canonically ascribed to agents by issuing statements of the form 'S knows that p' goes under the label of 'propositional knowledge'. And, although the qualifier 'propositional' is sometimes used rather innocently as just a way to register the form of such knowledge attributions, the view that propositional knowledge is a relation to propositions is currently taken for granted by many epistemologists. This may be due to the circumstance that the idea that knowledge (from now on I will omit the qualifier 'propositional') is a species of belief has largely survived the demise of the traditional analysis that equates it to justified true belief. For belief is standardly assumed to be a propositional attitude, i.e., a relation to propositions; and if knowledge is just an especially valuable
Knowledge Attributions in Context of Decision Problems
Synthese Library, 2013
Relevance and Non-Factive Knowledge Attributions
Acta Analytica, 2018
Since Gettier's (1963) seminal work, epistemologists have broadly questioned the validity of the tripartite analyses, arguing that entertaining a justified true belief is sometimes neither sufficient nor necessary for attributing knowledge to a cognitive subject.
(2017) The mind-independence of contexts for knowledge attributions
(with Christopher Gauker) The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Contextualism, J. Ichikawa (ed.): Part VIII, ch. 35 https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315745275
If we say that the truth of a statement of the form “S knows that p” depends on the pertinent context, that raises the question, what determines the pertinent context? One answer would be: the speaker. Another would be: the speaker and the hearer jointly somehow. Yet a third answer would be: No one gets to decide; it is a matter of what the conversation is supposed to achieve and how the world really is, and it can happen that all of the interlocutors are mistaken about the pertinent context. In this way, the context relevant to knowledge attributions might be mind-independent. In this chapter, we will explore the consequences of taking contexts to be mind-independent. We will not give a definitive account of what determines the pertinent context, but we will have something to say about it. Our focus will be on pointing out that certain debates that have been conducted in the literature might have a different outcome if the possibility that contexts are mind-independent were clearly on the table.
Know-how and concept possession
Philosophical Studies, 2007
We begin with a puzzle: why do some know-how attributions entail ability attributions while others do not? After rejecting the tempting response that know-how attributions are ambiguous, we argue that a satisfactory answer to the puzzle must acknowledge the connection between know-how and concept possession (specifically, reasonable conceptual mastery, or understanding). This connection appears at first to be grounded solely in the cognitive nature of certain activities. However, we show that, contra anti-intellectualists, the connection between know-how and concept possession can be generalized via reflection on the cognitive nature of intentional action and the potential of certain misunderstandings to undermine know-how even when the corresponding abilities and associated propositional knowledge are in place. Such considerations make explicit the intimate relation between know-how and understanding, motivating a general intellectualist analysis of the former in terms of the latter.
Narrativity and Knowledge
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2009
The ever-expanding literature on narrative reveals a striking divergence of claims about the epistemic valence of narrative. One such claim is the oft-stated idea that narratives or stories generate both "hot" (motivated) and "cold" (purely cognitive) epistemic irrationality. A familiar, rival claim is that narrative has an exclusive capacity to embody or convey important types of knowledge. Such contrasting contentions are not typically presented as statements about the accidents or effects of particular narratives; the ambition, rather, has been to identify a strong link between a single, positive or negative epistemic valence and narrativity, or the traits in virtue of which some discourse, utterance, or series of thoughts is aptly classified as a narrative or story. In this essay I contend that arguments in this vein are dubious. Not only are contentions about the specificity of narrative tenuous and controversial, but even if they were not, there are serious problems with the postulated connections between narrativity and the epistemic merits or demerits of narratives. These difficulties are identified in a critical discussion of prominent examples from the literature. My conclusion is not that there is nothing worth saying about relations between narratives and various epistemic desiderata, but that one prevalent theoretical ambition in this area ought to be renounced in favor of more viable avenues of inquiry. Section I quickly surveys salient claims about the link between narrativity and the epistemic value of narratives. In Section II, I highlight the striking divergence of ideas about narrativity in the literature and underscore the difficulty of justifying an appeal to any one of them in an argument about narrative's epistemic value. With this background in place, in Section III, I take a closer look at some influential examples of arguments concerning the epistemic dangers of narrative and present an argument against all strong claims in this area. In Section IV, I discuss examples in which the epistemic benefits of narrative are extolled on what I assess as inadequate grounds. I conclude with a summary and comments about implications for future research. i. narrative pro and con The putative epistemic merits or demerits of narratives or stories are sometimes linked to a claim intentionally made by the storyteller. 1 More often, the claim concerns features of story contents that exemplify or tend to be conducive of some type of epistemic item, such as knowledge or its contradictories, justified or unjustified belief, epistemic rationality or irrationality, and truth or falsehood. Briefly, then, salient contentions in the literature include the idea that narratives or
Knowledge Attributions and the Psychology of Reasoning: A Case against Contextualism
Prolegomena, 2013
Epistemic contextualism in the works of S. Cohen, K. DeRose, D. Lewis and others amounts to the semantic thesis that the truth conditions of knowledge attributions or denials vary according to the contextually shifting standards for knowledge attributions and to the indexical character of the predicate “knows”. This semantic variation is primarily due to the pragmatic features of the attributor context, depending on “what is at stake” for the attributor. In this paper contextualism is confronted with some invariantist objections. These objections are supported, first, by the considerations of the alleged, but indeed not purely the semantic or meta-linguistic character of the main contextualist theses: it is argued that contextualism unavoidably descend to the object level, making certain substantive claims about knowledge, and that the ambiguous evidence of contextualist thought-experiments make the truth- oriented or intellectualist invariantist alternative a more plausible and mor...
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[2010] Knowledge Attributions and Relevant Epistemic Standards
Context-Dependence, Perpsective and Relativity (edited by Francois Recanati, Isidora Stojanovic and Neftali Villanueva) de Gruyter Mouton, 2010
The paper is concerned with the semantics of knowledge attributions (K-claims, for short) and proposes a position holding that K-claims are context-sensitive that differs from extant views on the market. First I lay down the data a semantic theory for K-claims needs to explain. Next I present and assess three views purporting to give the semantics for K-claims: contextualism, subject-sensitive invariantism and relativism. All three views are found wanting with respect to their accounting for the data. I then propose a hybrid view according to which the relevant epistemic standards for making/evaluating K-claims are neither those at the context of the subject (subject-sensitive invariantism), nor those at the context of the assessor (relativism), but it is itself an open matter. However, given that we need a principled way of deciding which epistemic standards are the relevant ones, I provide a principle according to which the relevant standards are those that are the highest between those at the context of the subject and those at the context of the assessor/attributor. In the end I consider some objections to the view and offer some answers.
Knowledge and Implicatures
2013
In recent work on the semantics of ‘knowledge’-attributions, a variety of accounts have been proposed that aim to explain the data about speaker intuitions in familiar cases such as DeRose’s Bank Case or Cohen’s Airport Case by means of pragmatic mechanisms, notably Gricean implicatures. This paper argues that pragmatic explanations of the data regarding ‘knowledge’-attributions are unsuccessful and concludes that in explaining those data we have to resort to accounts that (a) take those data at their semantic face value (Epistemic Contextualism, Subject-Sensitive Invariantism or Epistemic Relativism), or (b) reject them on psychological grounds (Moderate Insensitive Invariantism). To establish this conclusion, the paper relies solely upon widely accepted assumptions about pragmatic theory, broadly construed, and on the Stalnakerian insight that linguistic communication takes place against the backdrop of a set of mutually accepted propositions: a conversation’s common ground.
What Characters Know: Projected Knowledge and Projected Co-Presence
Journal of Memory and Language, 2001
What inferences do readers make about "who knows what" in narrative worlds? We introduce the concepts of projected knowledge and projected co-presence to describe circumstances in which readers infer that characters possess information presented, for example, only in narration. Our experiments examine one type of evidence readers use to project knowledge. In Experiment 1, readers used characters' utterances as evidence to revise their judgments about characters' awareness information presented in the narration. Experiment 2 established that this effect is not due to the presence of just any utterance in the story. Experiment 3 demonstrated differential projection of knowledge for characters depending on whether they were speakers or addressees of the critical utterance. Experiment 4 suggested that readers make these inferences with limited reflection. Experiment 5 demonstrated that readers' judgment times for characters' knowledge is affected by the properties of the projecting utterance. We conclude that individuals are skilled in evaluating textual evidence to project knowledge and co-presence.
Practical Interests, Relevant Alternatives, and Knowledge Attributions
Review of Philosophy & Psychology, 2010
In defending his interest-relative account of knowledge in Knowledge and Practical Interests (2005), Jason Stanley relies heavily on intuitions about several bank cases. The cases we focus on are two that are crucial to Stanley’s project: one in which the protagonist does not have practical interest in the truth of the proposition she claims to know (Low Stakes) and one in which the protagonist does have such practical interest (High Stakes). We experimentally test the empirical claims that Stanley seems to make concerning our common-sense intuitions about these cases. Additionally, we test the empirical claims that Jonathan Schaffer (2006) seems to make, regarding the salience of an alternative, in his critique of Stanley. Our data indicate that neither raising the possibility of error nor raising stakes moves people from attributing knowledge to denying it. However, the raising of stakes (but not alternatives) does affect the level of confidence people have in their attributions of knowledge. We argue that our data cast doubt on what both Stanley and Schaffer claim our common-sense judgments about such cases are.
Alternative Questions and Knowledge Attributions
The Philosophical Quarterly, 2010
We discuss the 'problem of convergent knowledge', an argument presented by J. Schaffer in favour of contextualism about knowledge attributions, and against the idea that knowledge-wh can be simply reduced to knowledge of the proposition answering the question. Schaffer's argument centrally involves alternative questions of the form 'whether A or B'. We propose an analysis of these on which the problem of convergent knowledge does not arise. While alternative questions can contextually restrict the possibilities relevant for knowledge attributions, what Schaffer's puzzle reveals is a pragmatic ambiguity in what 'knowing the answer' means: in his problematic cases, the subject knows only a partial answer to the question. This partial knowledge can be counted as adequate only on externalist grounds.
Knowledge Attribution, Warranted Assertability Manoeuvre and the Maxim of Relation
According to the traditional account of knowledge, what turns a true belief into knowledge is only a matter of truth-relevant factors (evidence, reliability, etc.), and these epistemic standards do not vary across contexts. Still, our knowledge attributions seem to vary depending on practical factors. Some philosophers account for this variation by a shift in the warranted assertability conditions. The main way of fleshing out this proposal is based on the idea of conversational implicature generated by the maxim of relation . In this paper, I argue that this is not promising. The proposition that is supposed to be implicated in such cases concerns whether the subject is in a position to eliminate a salient alternative that is not knowledge-destroying. I will claim that in such contexts, this consideration is not more relevant than the question whether the subject knows, even if the stakes are high. 1
The Semantics of Knowledge Attributions: A Defence of Moderate Invariantism
This work has four aims: (i) to provide an overview of the current debate about the semantics of knowledge attributions, i.e. sentences of the form ⌜S knows that Φ⌝; (ii) to ground the debate in a single semantic-pragmatic framework; (iii) to identify a methodology for describing the semantics of knowledge attributions; (iv) to go some way towards describing the semantics of knowledge attributions in light of this methodology, and in particular to defend moderate invariantist semantics against its main current rivals. Aims (i) and (ii) are largely clarificatory; in §1 I set out a single semantic-pragmatic framework and over the course of this work show that it can be modified to explain and distinguish the various theories of the semantics of knowledge attributions currently on offer. Aim (iii) is also met in §1. I argue that a theory of the semantics of knowledge attributions T must be able to account for at least some ordinary speakers’ intuitions about the felicity or infelicity of utterances of the sentence ⌜S knows that Φ⌝ (felicity intuitions) purely in terms of its semantics. I also identify a number of theoretical considerations about knowledge and argue that if T conflicts with any one of these considerations, we should presume that T is false. Aim (iv) is met over the course of this work. According to moderate invariantism ⌜S knows that Φ⌝ is true if and only if S confidently believes the proposition expressed by Φ, this proposition is true and S’s epistemic position with respect to this proposition meets a moderately high epistemic standard. In §§2 – 5 I argue that the main current rivals to moderate invariantism – attributor contextualism, contrastivism, subject-sensitive invariantism and assessor relativism – conflict with at least one of the theoretical considerations identified in §1. In §6 I argue that moderate invariantism accounts for some ordinary speakers’ felicity intuitions purely in terms of the semantics of ⌜S knows that Φ⌝; I also argue that it is consistent with all of the theoretical considerations identified in §1. Moreover, in §§2 – 6 I argue that no theory is capable of accounting for all felicity intuitions purely in terms of the semantics of ⌜S knows that Φ⌝, and that only moderate invariantism can successfully explain why speakers have all of these intuitions. In §7 I conclude that moderate invariantism correctly describes of the semantics of knowledge attributions, or at least does so better than its main current rivals.
Enough is Enough: Pretense and Invariance in the Semantics of "knows that
Philosophical Perspectives, 2005
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