Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Normative scorekeeping

  • Published:
Synthese Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Epistemic contextualists think that the truth-conditions of ‘knowledge’ ascriptions depend in part on the context in which they are uttered. But what features of context play a role in determining truth-conditions? The idea that the making salient of error possibilities is a central part of the story has often been attributed to contextualists, and a number of contextualists seem to endorse it (see Cohen (Philos Perspect, 13:57–89, 1999) and Hawthorne, (Knowledge and lotteries, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004)). In this paper I argue that the focus on salience relations is a mistake. On the view I defend, the relevant features of context are facts about what error-possibilities and alternatives those in the context have a reason to consider, not facts about what error-possibilities and alternatives those in the context actually consider. As I will argue, this view has certain advantages over the standard view.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. Prominent defenders include Cohen (1999), DeRose (2009) and Lewis (1996). To avoid any tricky issues with use and mention, I have followed the convention of always putting quotation marks around ‘knows’ and its cognates.

  2. DeRose (2009, pp. 141–142) considers what he calls a ‘pure reasonableness view’, on which the features of context that determine the truth-conditions of ‘knowledge’ ascriptions are facts about what epistemic standard it would be most reasonable for those in the context to use. This view differs from interests contextualism in that it is put in terms of contextually varying epistemic standards rather than relevant alternatives (on this point see fn. 3), but otherwise it is very much in the same spirit. However, DeRose does not develop the view in any detail, and his main reason for rejecting it is that it is hard to see what makes an epistemic standard reasonable. One of my aims in this paper is to explain what makes it the case that those in the context have reasons to consider certain alternatives.

  3. The framework is from Lewis (1996). I will often talk as if the truth of a ‘knowledge’ ascription requires the ruling out of relevant alternatives but nothing of substance relies upon this. I could just as well talk of epistemic standards, and at a few points it will be convenient to talk in these terms. A translation scheme will be useful. Instead of saying, as I do here, that an utterance of a sentence of the form ‘S knows that p’ in context C expresses a proposition that’s true iff S possesses evidence that rules out the not-p alternatives that are relevant in C one could say that an utterance of a sentence of the form ‘S knows that p’ in context C expresses a proposition that’s true iff S’s epistemic position with respect to p is strong enough to meet the epistemic standard operative in C (see DeRose 1995).

  4. For some contrary data, see Buckwalter (2010) and May et al. (2010). For responses, see DeRose (2011) and Sripada and Stanley (2012).

  5. For some claims made by moon landing conspiracy theorists (and their detailed rebuttals) seehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_landing_conspiracy_theories- Photograph_and_film_oddities.

  6. This example, and the discussion that follows it, draws heavily on Williams (1980).

  7. It is worth emphasising that the view I am presenting here differs from the view defended in Stanley (2005). First, Stanley’s view—which he calls ‘interest-relative invariantism’—is a view about knowledge, whereas interests contextualism is a view about the truth-conditions of ‘knowledge’ ascriptions. Second, for the interests contextualist it is the practical interests of the ‘knowledge’ ascriber that matter, whereas on Stanley’s view it is the practical interests of the subject that matter. One dimension along which these views can be evaluated and compared is with respect to the range of cases discussed in Stanley (2005), and I carry out this task in McKenna (2013). A brief summary: First, I show that, while interests contextualism and interests-relative invariantism give the same result in certain cases (cases like Normal and High, and variants of those cases where those in the context are ignorant of the stakes), they give different results in cases where the ‘knowledge’ ascriber and the subject of the ‘knowledge’ ascription are in different contexts. Second, I argue that, on balance, these cases are more problematic for the interests-relative invariantist than the interests contextualist.

  8. Craig develops his account in Craig (1990). I am only going to discuss Craig’s account in very broad outline here, but I should emphasise that, while there may be problems with the details of Craig’s account, all I need to support my argument is that something in the general ballpark be correct. For further discussion see Kappel (2010) and Kusch (2011).

  9. While I do not argue that Craig’s account favours a sort of contextualism over invariantism here, Fricker (2008), Greco (2009), Hannon (2012) and Henderson (2009) do.

  10. I borrow this way of putting things from Hannon (2012). Can the defender of this Craigian story say anything more about the default relevant alternatives? The idea is that, for each proposition p, a community of ‘knowledge’ ascribers will converge on a relatively stable range of alternatives in which not-p that are relevant. It is important to note that someone who defends this part of the Craigian story does not have to specify how wide the range of default relevant alternatives is. After all, a ‘traditional’ or ‘strict’ invariantist might think that, for each proposition p, a stable range of alternatives in which not-p are relevant, but she does not need to specify how wide the range is. The Craigian story is a story about how the range came about—through social pressures—not about how wide it is.

  11. Thanks to a referee for this journal for pushing me to say more about the differences between the modified view and the original view.

  12. Thanks to a referee for this journal for pressing me on these questions.

  13. DeRose (2009) and Ichikawa (2011) both seem to endorse a similar view.

  14. As a referee for this journal pointed out to me, Lewis (1979) puts ‘within certain limits’ provisos on the rules of accommodation he proposes (see, for example, pp. 340–341; 349). Lewis accepts that there are certain limits (or, constraints) on conversational kinematics, but the challenge for Lewis (and the pluralist) is to specify those constraints (or limits) in a non-ad-hoc and informative way. I discuss some of the constraints proposed in Lewis (1996) below.

  15. Another of Lewis’s rules—the rule of resemblance—has it that any alternative that saliently resembles actuality is relevant (see Lewis 1996, pp. 556–558).

References

  • Blome-Tillmann, M. (2009). Knowledge and presuppositions. Mind, 118(470), 241–294.

    Google Scholar 

  • Buckwalter, W. (2010). Knowledge isn’t closed on Saturday: A study in ordinary language. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 1(3), 395–406.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cohen, S. (1999). Contextualism, skepticism, and the structure of reasons. Philosophical Perspectives, 13, 57–89.

    Google Scholar 

  • Craig, E. (1990). Knowledge and the state of nature: An essay in conceptual synthesis. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • DeRose, K. (1995). Solving the skeptical problem. Philosophical Review, 104(1), 1–52.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • DeRose, K. (2009). The case for contextualism. Oxford: Clarendon.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • DeRose, K. (2011). Contextualism, contrastivism, and X-phi surveys. Philosophical Studies, 156(1), 81–110.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fricker, M. (2008). Scepticism and the genealogy of knowledge: Situating epistemology in time. Philosophical Papers, 37(1), 27–50.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Greco, J. (2009). Knowledge and success from ability. Philosophical Studies, 142(1), 17–26.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hannon, M. (2012). The practical origins of epistemic contextualism. Erkenntnis. doi:10.1007/s10670-012-9426-z.

  • Hawthorne, J. (2004). Knowledge and lotteries. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Henderson, D. (2009). Motivated contextualism. Philosophical Studies, 142(1), 119–131.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Ichikawa, J. (2011). Quantifiers and epistemic contextualism. Philosophical Studies, 155(3), 383–398.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kappel, K. (2010). On saying that someone knows: Themes from Craig. In A. Haddock, A. Millar, & D. Pritchard (Eds.), Social epistemology (pp. 69–88). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  • Kelp, C. (2011). What’s the point of ‘knowledge’ anyway? Episteme, 8, 53–66.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kusch, M. (2011). Knowledge and certainties in the epistemic state of nature. Episteme, 8, 6–23.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lewis, D. (1979). Scorekeeping in a language game. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 8, 339–359.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Lewis, D. (1996). Elusive knowledge. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 74, 649–667.

    Google Scholar 

  • May, J., Sinnott-Armstrong, W., Hull, J. G., & Zimmerman, A. (2010). Practical interests, relevant alternatives, and knowledge attributions: An empirical study. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 1(2), 265–273.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • McKenna, R. (2011). Interests contextualism. Philosophia, 39(4), 741–750.

    Google Scholar 

  • McKenna, R. (2013). Epistemic contextualism: a normative approach. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 94(1), 101–123.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pritchard, D. (2001). Contextualism, skepticism, and the problem of epistemic descent. Dialectica, 55(4), 327–349.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pritchard, D. (2010). Contextualism, skepticism and warranted assertibility maneuvers. In J. Keim Campbell, M. O’Rourke, & H. Silverstein (Eds.), Knowledge and skepticism, (pp. 85–103). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Sripada, S., & Stanley, J. (2012). Empirical tests of interest-relative invariantism. Episteme, 9(1), 3–26.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stalnaker, R. (1974). Pragmatic presuppositions, (pp. 47–62). Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Reprinted from Context and content, 2001).

  • Stanley, J. (2005). Knowledge and practical interests. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Vogel, J. (1999). The new relevant alternatives theory. Philosophical Perspectives, 13, 155–180.

    Google Scholar 

  • Williams, B. (1980). Internal and external reasons. (Reprinted with postscript Varieties of practical reasoning, pp. 77–97, by E. Millgram, Ed., 2001. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).

Download references

Acknowledgments

Thanks to two anonymous referees for this journal for helpful feedback on an earlier version of this paper. Thanks also to Michael Blome-Tillmann, Jessica Brown, Matthew Chrisman, John Greco, Patrick Greenough, Michael Hannon, Allan Hazlett, Torfinn Huvenes, Dirk Kindermann, Sebastian Köhler, Jared Peterson, Duncan Pritchard, Amy Seymour, audiences at the Arché Epistemology Seminar, the 2012 European Epistemology Network Meeting in Bologna, the 2011 Notre Dame/Northwestern Graduate Epistemology Conference and the 2011 Edinburgh Graduate Epistemology Conference. The research for this paper was funded by the Carnegie Trust.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Science, University of Edinburgh, Dugald Stewart Building, 3 Charles Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AD, Scotland

    Robin McKenna

Authors
  1. Robin McKenna
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Robin McKenna.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

McKenna, R. Normative scorekeeping. Synthese 191, 607–625 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0293-1

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-013-0293-1

Keywords

Search

Navigation