Abstract
Epistemic contextualists think that the extension of the expression ‘knows’ (and its cognates) depends on and varies with the context of utterance. In the last 15 years or so this view has faced intense criticism. This paper focuses on two sorts of objections. The first are what I call the ‘linguistic objections’, which purport to show that the best available linguistic evidence suggests that ‘knows’ is not context-sensitive. The second is what I call the ‘disagreement problem’, which concerns the behaviour of ‘knows’ in disagreement reports. These may not be the only objections to epistemic contextualism, but they are probably the most influential. I argue that the best current epistemic contextualist response to the linguistic objection is incomplete, and I show how it can be supplemented to deal with the full range of linguistic objections. I also develop a new solution to the disagreement problem. The upshot is that neither sort of objection gives us any reason to reject epistemic contextualism. This conclusion is, in a sense, negative—no new arguments for epistemic contextualism are advanced—but it’s a vital step towards rehabilitating the view.
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Notes
I use ‘*’ to indicate ungrammaticality.
While the second constructions are both felicitous, they have to be read as x is snoring more frequently than y and x is shouting more often than y, rather than as x is snoring more loudly than y and x is shouting more loudly than y.
As Ludlow (2005) notes, this construction is perfectly felicitous. But, as Stanley (2005, pp. 69–70) points out in response, we also say things like ‘France is hexagonal by loose standards’. While expressions like ‘by strict/loose standards’ might perform some interesting function, that doesn’t tell us anything about the context-sensitivity of the expression ‘knows’ (or ‘hexagonal’).
I think mafioso is good reason to deny that one has to know \(p\) in order to know that one regrets that \(p\).
Of course, this might not be the end of the process. B might object that A’s newly clarified claim still fails to take something important into account. At this point, A has the same set of options (I come back to this point below).
Note that the contextualist can’t respond by appealing to the fact that knowledge is both factive and the norm of assertion. One can assert (17) or (19) without committing oneself to having hands or the bank being open on Saturdays, and (18) is problematic because it looks like a violation of the closure principle (very roughly, the principle that, if one knows \(p\) and one knows if \(p\) then \(q\), then one is in a position to know \(q\)).
The cases are inspired by DeRose’s ‘Thelma & Louise’ cases (2009, Ch. 1).
Assume that Jack did perform the service.
This picture is similar to the picture of how contextualism about ‘knows’ works outlined in §1.3. Again, in both cases the inspiration is Lewis (1979).
Sundell (2011), for instance, appeals to context disagreement in defence of contextualism about matters of taste (including the aesthetic).
Two clarifications: First, it’s plausible that recommending something involves more than adopting a non-doxastic attitude towards that thing. But it certainly seems right that recommending something does involve inter alia adopting a non-doxastic attitude towards that thing. I’m focusing on the non-doxastic attitude aspect of recommendations. Second, what do I mean by the claim that ‘knowledge’ ascriptions ‘function pragmatically’ as recommendations? The idea, very roughly, is that this is part of their illocutionary force. A relevant comparison is with ‘good’ claims. It’s plausible that ‘good’ claims express approval, and one can incorporate that into a standard truth-conditional semantics for ‘good’ claims by holding that this is part of their illocutionary force.
It’s worth briefly clarifying how the solution to the disagreement problem proposed here differs from the solution proposed in DeRose (2009, Ch. 4) on which disagreement, whether within a single conversation or across conversations, results in truth-value gaps. The view proposed here is consistent with DeRose’s view. But the question of what happens to the truth-values of our claims while we’re negotiating over the extensions of various terms that figure in those claims is a vexed one, and it’s a question for everyone, not just for the contextualist about ‘knows’ (it is just as much a question for the contextualist about ‘tall’). To my mind, we need to settle the general question before settling the particular question about ‘knows’.
Thanks to Davide Fassio, Michael Hannon, Allan Hazlett and two anonymous reviewers for this journal for extremely helpful feedback on earlier versions of this paper. Research on this paper was assisted by funding from the ERC Advanced Grant Project “The Emergence of Relativism” (Grant No. 339382), a postdoctoral fellowship from the University of Geneva and the Carnegie Trust.
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McKenna, R. Epistemic contextualism defended. Synthese 192, 363–383 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0572-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0572-5