Knowledge, Bets and Interests
| Abstract | When you pick up a volume like this one, which describes itself as being about ‘knowledge ascriptions’, you probably expect to find it full of papers on epistemology, broadly construed. And you’d probably expect many of those papers to concern themselves with cases where the interests of various parties (ascribers, subjects of the ascriptions, etc.) change radically, and this affects the truth values of various ascriptions. And, at least in this paper, your expectations will be clearly met. But here’s an interesting contrast. If you’d picked up a volume of papers on ‘belief ascriptions’, you’d expect to find a radically different menu of writers and subjects. You’d expect to find a lot of concern about names and demonstratives, and about how they can be used by people not entirely certain about their denotation. More generally, you’d expect to find less epistemology, and much more mind and language. I haven’t read all the companion papers to mine in this volume, but I bet you won’t find much of that here. This is perhaps unfortunate, since belief ascriptions and knowledge ascriptions raise at least some similar issues. Consider a kind of contextualism about belief ascriptions, which holds that (L) can be truly uttered in some contexts, but not in others, depending on just what aspects of Lois Lane’s psychology are relevant in the conversation.1 (L) Lois Lane believes that Clark Kent is vulnerable to kryptonite. We could imagine a theorist who says that whether (L) can be uttered truly depends on whether it matters to the conversation that Lois Lane might not recognise Clark Kent when he’s wearing his Superman uniform. And, this theorist might continue, this isn’t because ‘Clark Kent’ is a context-sensitive expression; it is rather because ‘believes’ is context-sensitive. Such a theorist will also, presumably, say that whether (K) can be uttered truly is context-sensitive. (K) Lois Lane knows that Clark Kent is vulnerable to kryptonite. And so, our theorist is a kind of contextualist about knowledge ascriptions.. | |||||||||
| 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: 5,672 |
| External links |
  Try with proxy. |
| Through your library | Only published papers are available at libraries |
Similar books and articlesBryan Frances (2002). A Test for Theories of Belief Ascription. Analysis 62 (2):116–125.
Theodore Sider (1995). Three Problems for Richard's Theory of Belief Ascription. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 25 (4):487 - 513.
Jennifer Nagel (2008). Knowledge Ascriptions and the Psychological Consequences of Changing Stakes. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 86 (2):279-294.
Herman Cappelen & Josh Dever (2001). Believing in Words. Synthese 127 (3):279 - 301.
Daniel Halliday (2005). What Explains Our Intuitions About Knowledge Ascriptions? Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 105 (3):393–402.
Jonathan Schaffer (2008). The Contrast-Sensitivity of Knowledge Ascriptions. Social Epistemology 22 (3):235-245.
Ram Neta (2008). How Cheap Can You Get? Philosophical Issues 18 (1):130-142.
Claudia Bianchi (2005). How to Be a Contextualist. Facta Philosophica 7 (2):261-272.
René van Woudenberg (2005). Contextualism and the Many Senses of Knowledge. Grazer Philosophische Studien 69 (1):147-164.
Jessica Brown & Mikkel Gerken (eds.) (2012). Knowledge Ascriptions. Oxford University Press.
Ram Neta (2007). Contextualism and a Puzzle About Seeing. Philosophical Studies 134 (1):53-63.
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.
Ari Maunu (2002). A Problem with De Re Belief Ascriptions, with a Consequence to Substitutivity. Philosophia 29 (1-4):411-421.
Daniele Sgaravatti & Elia Zardini (2008). Knowing How to Establish Intellectualism. Grazer Philosophische Studien 77 (1):217-261.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2010-11-22Total downloads30 ( #40,824 of 549,063 )Recent downloads (6 months)2 ( #37,252 of 549,063 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
