From Epistemic Expressivism to Epistemic Inferentialism
In Adrian Haddock, Alan Millar & Duncan Pritchard (eds.), Social Epistemology. Oxford University Press (2010)
| Abstract | Recent philosophical debate about the meaning of knowledge claims has largely centered on the question of whether epistemic claims are plausibly thought to be context sensitive. The default assumption has been that sentences that attribute knowledge or justification (or whatever else is epistemic) have stable truth-conditions across different contexts of utterance, once any non-epistemic context sensitivity has been fixed. The contrary view is the contextualist view that such sentences do not have stable truth-conditions but can vary depending on the context of utterance. This debate manifestly presupposes that the meta-epistemological issue of accounting for the meaning of epistemic claims is to be settled by determining the truth-conditions of these claims. I think this presupposition is undermotivated in light of two observations. First, many epistemologists see epistemic claims as evaluative or normative, in some sense. Second, in the meta-ethical debate most philosophers take alternatives to truth-conditional semantics, such as expressivism, as live options when it comes to evaluative or normative claims. As it turns out, I think expressivism doesn’t provide a plausible account of normative concepts across the board. But considering it as an alternative in the meta-epistemological debate points the way to another alternative to truth-conditional semantics. This is a form of inferentialism. In this paper, I try to motivate a move to epistemic inferentialism by showing how it overcomes worries about expressivism and interacts with plausible ideas about the social function epistemic claims play in our commerce with one another and the word. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,875 |
| External links |
  Try with proxy. |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesMatthew Chrisman (2012). Epistemic Expressivism. Philosophy Compass 7 (2):118-126.
Matthew Chrisman (2007). From Epistemic Contextualism to Epistemic Expressivism. Philosophical Studies 135 (2):225 - 254.
Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij (forthcoming). Moderate Epistemic Expressivism. Philosophical Studies.
J. Adam Carter & Matthew Chrisman (2012). Is Epistemic Expressivism Incompatible with Inquiry? Philosophical Studies 159 (3):323-339.
Klemens Kappel (2011). Is Epistemic Expressivism Dialectically Incoherent? Dialectica 65 (1):49-69.
Allan Hazlett (forthcoming). Expressivism and Convention-Relativism About Epistemic Discourse. In A. Fairweather & O. Flanagan (eds.), Naturalizing Epistemic Virtue. Cambridge University Press.
Benjamin Schnieder (2010). Expressivism Concerning Epistemic Modals. Philosophical Quarterly 60 (240):601-615.
Mark Schroeder (forthcoming). Hard Cases for Combining Expressivism and Deflationist Truth: Conditionals and Epistemic Modals. In Steven Gross & Michael Williams (eds.), (unknown). Oxford.
Matthew Chrisman (2010). Expressivism, Inferentialism, and the Theory of Meaning. In Michael Brady (ed.), New Waves in Metaethics. Palgrave-Macmillan.
Dan Zeman (2010). Knowledge Attributions and Relevant Epistemic Standards. In François Recanati, Isidora Stojanovic & Neftali Villanueva (eds.), Context-dependence, Perspective and Relativity. Mouton de Gruyter.
Christos Kyriacou (2012). Habits-Expressivism About Epistemic Justification. Philosophical Papers 41 (2):209 - 237.
Rik Peels (2010). Epistemic Desiderata and Epistemic Pluralism. Journal of Philosophical Research 35 (1):193-207.
Terence Cuneo (2007). The Normative Web: An Argument for Moral Realism. Oxford University Press.
Antonia Barke (2004). Epistemic Contextualism. Erkenntnis 61 (2-3):353 - 373.
Dan Zeman (2010). Knowledge Attributions and Relevant Epistemic Standards. In Recanati François, Stojanovic Isidora & Villanueva Neftali (eds.), Context Dependence, Perpsective and Relativity. Mouton de Gruyter.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2010-08-25Total downloads61 ( #15,923 of 556,837 )Recent downloads (6 months)1 ( #64,847 of 556,837 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
