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From Epistemic Contextualism to Epistemic Expressivism

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Abstract

In this paper, I exploit the parallel between epistemic contextualism and metaethical speaker-relativism to argue that a promising way out of two of the primary problems facing contextualism is one already explored in some detail in the ethical case – viz. expressivism. The upshot is an argument for a form of epistemic expressivism modeled on a familiar form of ethical expressivism. This provides a new nondescriptivist option for understanding the meaning of knowledge attributions, which arguably better captures the normative nature of epistemic discourse than descriptivist competitors like invariantism and contextualism.

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Correspondence to Matthew Chrisman.

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Chrisman, M. From Epistemic Contextualism to Epistemic Expressivism. Philos Stud 135, 225–254 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-005-2012-3

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