Summary |
Suppose Sally has good reason to believe that the bank will be open on Saturday. Many epistemologists have thought that she may know this when the stakes are low, but not when they are high. For example, if Sally will be evicted from her home if she doesn't get to the bank on Saturday to deposit a paycheck, then one might argue she doesn't know that the bank will be open. Perhaps she needs to aquire more evidence than normal in order to know. Both invariantists and contextualists have tried to capture such cases, often based on the idea that this is clearly what we would ordinarily say about such cases. On some construals, these are empirical claims which can be further tested by rigorous experimental tools. Researchers have been producing data on ordinary judgments about such cases. Some test vignettes drawn directly from the literature, while others invent new cases to answer new questions that have arisen in light of the studies. The literature is currently in development, and results are somewhat mixed: experiments have uncovered effects of changing context on knowledge ascriptions, but it is disputed whether those effects should be explained using contextualist or invariantist resources. |