Online research in philosophy

Relativism, in the sense at issue here, is a view about the meaning of knowledge attributions—statements of the form “S knows that p.” Like contextualism, it holds that the truth of knowledge claims is sensitive to contextual factors, such as which alternatives are relevant at the context, or how high the stakes are. For the relativist, however, the relevant context is the context from which the knowledge claim is being assessed, not the context at which it was made.

We can be willing in one context to attribute a bit of knowledge that we wouldn’t attribute and might even deny in another, especially a context in which we’re stumped by a skeptical argument. Apparently, our standards for knowledge sometimes go up, sometimes way up. How can this be? By claiming that the very contents of knowledge ascribing sentences vary with contexts of use, epistemic contextualism offers one explanation. I will offer another. According to contextualism, variation in standards is built into this claimed variation in contents. According to me, the contents of knowledge attributions are invariant. The variation is in what knowledge attributions we’re willing to make or accept. Sometimes our standards are too strong, sometimes they’re too weak, and sometimes they’re just right.

In "Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions," Keith DeRose defends a contextualist theory of knowledge.' He claims that his theory is superior to some earlier "relevant alternatives" theories in respect of its proper handling of issues concerning the meaning of knowledge attributions. I think that some of DeRose's key claims on this score are mistaken.

Many epistemologists treat knowledge as a binary relation that holds between a subject and a proposition. The contrastive account of knowledge developed by Jonathan Schaffer maintains that knowledge is a ternary, contrastive relation that holds between a subject, a proposition, and a set of contextually salient alternative propositions the subject’s evidence must eliminate. For the contrastivist, it is never simply the case that S knows that p; in every case of knowledge S knows that p rather than q. This paper offers a counterexample to the contrastive account of knowledge. Part 1 summarizes the contrastive theory developed by Schaffer in a series of recent papers. Part 2 presents an example from a class of cases characterized by compatibility between the proposition p and each of the alternative propositions that occupy q. In such cases the alternative propositions that partially constitute the ternary contrastive relation play no role in the acquisition of knowledge. Part 3 considers and rejects potential responses to the counterexample. The paper concludes that the contrastive theory is not a general account of knowledge.

How should one understand knowledge-wh ascriptions? That is, how should one understand claims such as ‘‘I know where the car is parked,’’ which feature an interrogative complement? The received view is that knowledge-wh reduces to knowledge that p, where p happens to be the answer to the question Q denoted by the wh-clause. I will argue that knowledge-wh includes the question—to know-wh is to know that p, as the answer to Q. I will then argue that knowledge-that includes a contextually implicit question. I will conclude that knowledge is a question-relative state. Knowing is knowing the answer, and whether one knows the answer depends (in part) on the question.

How should one understand knowledge-wh ascriptions? That is, how should one understand claims such as “I know where the car is parked,” which feature an interrogative complement? The received view is that knowledge-wh reduces to knowledge that p, where p happens to be the answer to the question Q denoted by the wh-clause. I will argue that knowledge-wh includes the question-to know-wh is to know that p, as the answer to Q. 1 will then argue that knowledge-that includes a contextually implicit question. I will conclude that knowledge is a question-relative state. Knowing is knowing the answer, and whether one knows the answer depends (in part) on the question.

The basic idea of conversational contextualism is that knowledge attributions are context sensitive in that a given knowledge attribution may be true if made in one context but false if made in another, owing to differences in the attributors’ conversational contexts. Moreover, the context sensitivity involved is traced back to the context sensitivity of the word “know,” which, in turn, is commonly modelled on the case either of genuine indexicals such as “I” or “here” or of comparative adjectives such as “tall” or “rich.” But contextualism faces various problems. I argue that in order to solve these problems we need to look for another account of the context sensitivity involved in knowledge attributions and I sketch an alternative proposal.

Jonathan is known for his answers as well as his questions. In fact, he is known for giving the same answer to different questions. This illustrates his point about convergent questions: different questions can have the same answer. Jonathan relies on this point to show that if p is the answer to a certain question, knowing the answer to that question doesn’t consist merely in knowing that p. Since p is the answer to many questions, and you can know the answer to one without knowing the answer to another, knowing that p does not suffice for knowing the answer to the question in question. This argument refutes the orthodox reductive view or, as I’ll call it for short, the stupid view. Jonathan thinks that knowledge-wh relates a knower to a question as well as an answer – it’s a three-term relation. Indeed, as previous visitors to Bellingham know, Jonathan even thinks that knowledge-that is a three-term relation. His not-so-hidden agenda this time around is to parlay the shortcomings of the stupid view of knowledge- wh into new support for his contrastivist view of knowledge-that. He now thinks that even “knowledge-that includes a question” (p. 14). As for me, there’s a more sensible way to improve upon the stupid view. This sensible view is reductive insofar as it holds that knowledge-wh reduces to knowledgethat, with knowledge-that understood as a two-term relation. And it’s reductive in a different way: it’s not expansive like Jonathan’s view, which incorporates both questions and answers into knowledge-wh ascriptions. The sensible view says that knowledge-wh is a two-term relation, relating knowers just to questions. Even so, as I will explain, it agrees with Jonathan that knowing-wh is knowing the answer (or at least an answer – like Jonathan, I’ll downplay the fact that some questions have more than one true answer). Best of all, the sensible view exhibits the connection between answers and questions. It shows precisely how it is that what you know when you know the answer to a question is the answer to that question..

The paper examines the logic and semantics of knowledge attributions of the form “ s knows whether A or B”. We analyze these constructions in an epistemic logic with alternative questions, and propose an account of the context-sensitivity of the corresponding sentences and of their presuppositions.

Call knowledge where so-and-so, knowledge who so-and-so, etc., knowledge-wh . The reductive view says that knowledge- wh reduces to the two-place knowledge relation Ksp. Schaffer (2007) argues that this view has no viable response to the problem of convergent knowledge: how can a knowing- wh ascription be reduced to a Ksp ascription if a second knowing- wh ascription intuitively inequivalent to the first can be reduced to the same Ksp ascription? Instead he suggests that knowledge- wh be understood as a three-place knowledge relation Kspq, where q is a contextually salient contrast proposition. I argue firstly that once we realise that wh -questions can have more than one true answer, the reductivist has an obvious response to this problem. Secondly, I pose a revenge problem for Schaffer's contrastivist alternative: how can a knowing- wh ascription be reduced to a Kspq ascription if a second knowing- wh ascription intuitively equivalent to the first can be reduced to a distinct Kspq ascription?