Knowledge ascriptions and the psychological consequences of changing stakes
Australasian Journal of Philosophy 86 (2):279-294 (2008)
| Abstract | Why do our intuitive knowledge ascriptions shift when a subject's practical interests are mentioned? Many efforts to answer this question have focused on empirical linguistic evidence for context sensitivity in knowledge claims, but the empirical psychology of belief formation and attribution also merits attention. The present paper examines a major psychological factor (called ?need-for-closure?) relevant to ascriptions involving practical interests. Need-for-closure plays an important role in determining whether one has a settled belief; it also influences the accuracy of one's cognition. Given these effects, it is a mistake to assume that high- and low-stakes subjects provided with the same initial evidence are perceived to enjoy belief formation that is the same as far as truth-conducive factors are concerned. This mistaken assumption has underpinned contextualist and interest-relative invariantist treatments of cases in which contrasting knowledge ascriptions are elicited by descriptions of subjects with the same initial information and different stakes. The paper argues that intellectualist invariantism can easily accommodate such cases | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
  |
| External links |
|
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesJessica Brown & Mikkel Gerken (eds.) (2012). Knowledge Ascriptions. Oxford University Press.
René van Woudenberg (2005). Contextualism and the Many Senses of Knowledge. Grazer Philosophische Studien 69 (1):147-164.
Jennifer Nagel (2010). Knowledge Ascriptions and the Psychological Consequences of Thinking About Error. Philosophical Quarterly 60 (239):286-306.
Daniele Sgaravatti & Elia Zardini (2008). Knowing How to Establish Intellectualism. Grazer Philosophische Studien 77 (1):217-261.
Jennifer Nagel (2011). The Psychological Basis of the Harman-Vogel Paradox. Philosophers' Imprint 11 (5):1-28.
Stephen Schiffer (2007). Interest-Relative Invariantism. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (1):188-195.
Stephen Schiffer (2007). Interest-Relative Invariantism. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75 (1):188-195.
Jennifer Nagel (2010). Epistemic Anxiety and Adaptive Invariantism. Philosophical Perspectives 24 (1):407-435.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-01-28Total downloads100 ( #6,128 of 548,973 )Recent downloads (6 months)23 ( #2,164 of 548,973 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
