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Epistemic Contextualism and the Knowability Problem

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Abstract

The paper critically examines an objection to epistemic contextualism recently developed by Elke Brendel and Peter Baumann, according to which it is impossible for the contextualist to know consistently that his theory is true. I first present an outline of contextualism and its reaction to scepticism. Then the necessary and sufficient conditions for the knowability problem to arise are explored. Finally, it will be argued that contextualism does not fulfil these minimal conditions. It will be shown that the contrary view is based on a misunderstanding of what contextualists are claiming.

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Notes

  1. Brendel and Baumann speak of the factivity problem, since the problem arises only given the factivity of knowledge. I call it the knowability problem, since this label better characterises the type of problem we are confronted with.

  2. Crispin Wright (2005) presents a similar difficulty for contextualism. I will not explore whether, and to what extent, the present discussion affects his arguments.

  3. Since the contexts involved are those of the speaker or knowledge-attributor and not those of the epistemic subject herself, it is also customary to speak of “attributor-contextualism”. I here ignore other forms of contextualism, viz., the subject-contextualism defended by John Hawthorne (2004) and Jason Stanley (2005). I also ignore Schaffer’s (2004b) contrastivism.

  4. For this way of representing contextualism, see also Bach 2005. By indexing “know” in the way described, we are not threatened to fall prey to the fallacy of semantic descent, which we would be if we were to use disquotation without indexing (see Brendel 2005, p. 46, and Baumann 2008, p. 588 ff.).

  5. Disquotation can be used only given the legitimate oversimplification that neither ‘S’ nor ‘p’ contains any indexical expression.

  6. Jonathan Schaffer (2004a, p. 144) has called contextualism “epistemic pluralism”. My rendering makes the pluralistic aspect especially obvious. Note that the object-language rendering can be retranslated into a meta-linguistic version without loss of content.

  7. I borrow the term “strength of epistemic position” and its cognates from DeRose (1995, e.g., p. 34). Note that the strength of the epistemic position is independent of the context of knowledge ascription.

  8. Again, I simplify by assuming such claims to be about complete propositions, not involving other indexical terms, etc.

  9. Throughout this paper, I shall assume that are not empty. If one of them is empty, the knowability problem does not arise in the first place.

  10. “[T]he sceptic typically argues that we do not know because we cannot know” (Williamson 2001, p. 27; cf. Grundmann 2008, p. 346). Sometimes the sceptic position is described as stating the much weaker claim that all knowledge ascriptions are false as a matter of contingent fact. Such a characterisation, however, is not really distinctive of scepticism. A moderate (non-sceptical) invariantist may – pace Hawthorne (2004, p. 53) – also hold that all knowledge ascriptions are, as a matter of fact, false, if he thinks that, for one reason or another, people do not fulfil his moderate demands. Surprising as this empirical fact would be, this would not turn moderate invariantism into a form of scepticism.

  11. I have sympathies with those who claim that this answer to scepticism is not adequate (see, e.g., Sosa 2000, Kornblith 2000 and Williams 2001). But this debate is only tangential to the purposes of this essay.

  12. The symbol stands for entailment.

  13. Of course, proposition (I) is not needed, since it follows with (Fact) from (III).

  14. For proof, see Brueckner & Buford 2009, p. 432, and my argument below.

  15. The argument does not show that knowledgel of (I) and (II) is impossible. In this paper I usually identify the question of knowability with knowabilityh, as the critics of contextualism must do.

  16. Throughout this paper I assume that c is a proposition: (Of course, I also assume that .)

  17. One direction of (Thesis), from right to left, is no more than a complicated way of stating what we may conclude from Fitch’s paradox, namely, that a proposition of the form cannot be known to be true by S at T.

  18. The scope of the propositional quantifier is important. The knowabilityX,S,T problem is not derivable if (Condition) is replaced by .

  19. Note that (Thesis) does not involve different contexts for knowledge attribution and therefore does not point out a constraint relevant specifically for contextualism. As a consequence there are also invariantist theories of knowledge that have the knowabilityX,S,T problem. It can, for example, easily be shown that the strengthened version of global scepticism, is not knowableX by S at T. I leave the proof to the reader.

  20. A simple way of showing this is by pointing out that (Compatibility) is consistent with (Omniscience)

  21. The standard way of presenting contextualism is as follows:

    (SC) seems to be a faithful rendering of Cohen’s and DeRose’s views. (See, for example, the quotes in sect. 1.) Contextualism of this sort entails (Compatibility) and therefore serves the contextualist’s anti-sceptic aims. But if CT = (SC), (Condition*) is as false as it is for CT = (Compatibility). (SC) does not have the knowability problem.

  22. See the quote from DeRose given above, but also, for example, Cohen 1998, p. 292, and Lewis 1999, p. 434 ff.

  23. Similarly Schaffer 2004a, p. 143, Brueckner & Buford 2009, p. 431, and Baumann 2010, p. 83.

  24. Analogous remarks apply, of course, to Cohen’s (1999) airport example.

  25. If (Scepticismh) is embraced, then the impossibility of knowingh an empirical proposition is trivial. Any problem concerning the impossibility of knowledgablyh stating a contextualist scenario derives from (Scepticismh), not from contextualism. Contextualism cannot be the culprit.

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Acknowledgements

The research for this paper has been generously supported by the Zukunftskolleg of the University of Konstanz. I wish to thank Christopher von Bülow, Wolfgang Spohn, Holger Sturm and especially Alexandra Zinke for many helpful discussions, and two anonymous referees for useful comments.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, Zukunftskolleg, University of Konstanz, Box 21, 78457, Konstanz, Germany

    Wolfgang Freitag

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Freitag, W. Epistemic Contextualism and the Knowability Problem. Acta Anal 26, 273–284 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-010-0112-y

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