The semantics of knowledge attributions

Acta Analytica 20 (1):16-28 (2005)
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Abstract

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.

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Citations of this work

Epistemic Contextualism: An Idle Hypothesis.John Turri - 2017 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 95 (1):141-156.
Knowledge claims and context: loose use.Wayne A. Davis - 2007 - Philosophical Studies 132 (3):395-438.
Contextualism and the Factivity Problem.Peter Baumann - 2008 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76 (3):580-602.
Relativism and Conservatism.Alexander Dinges - 2020 - Erkenntnis 85 (4):757-772.

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References found in this work

Knowledge and lotteries.John Hawthorne - 2004 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Elusive knowledge.David K. Lewis - 1996 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (4):549 – 567.
Solving the skeptical problem.Keith DeRose - 1995 - Philosophical Review 104 (1):1-52.
Knowledge and Lotteries.John Hawthorne - 2005 - Philosophical Quarterly 55 (219):353-356.
Contextualism and knowledge attributions.Keith DeRose - 1992 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (4):913-929.

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