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Possibilities regained: neo-Lewisian contextualism and ordinary life

  • S.I.: The Legacy of David Lewis
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Abstract

According to David Lewis, the predicate ‘knows’ is context-sensitive in the sense that its truth conditions vary across conversational contexts, which stretch or compress the domain of error possibilities to be eliminated by the subject’s evidence (Lewis, Aust J Philos 74:549–567, 1996; Lewis, J Philos Log 8:339–359, 1979). Our concern in this paper is to thematize, assess, and overcome within a neo-Lewisian contextualist project two important mismatches between our use of ‘know’ in ordinary life and the use of ‘know’ by ‘Lewisian’ ordinary speakers. The first mismatch is that Lewisian contextualism still overgenerates the error possibilities which cannot be ignored in a given context, since it is oblivious to the distinction between ‘invented’ and ‘discovered’ possibilities. The second mismatch is a full-scale one: an adequate account of knowledge attribution is not exhausted by the subject’s negative capacity of pruning branches off the tree of counterpossibilities. We therefore introduce a new vector of value, which explains how ‘know’ comes in degrees: the satisfaction of ‘know better’ is made to depend on the capacity of imagining (actualized) possibilities connected in a relevant way with the subject’s (true) beliefs.

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Notes

  1. There are several proposals falling under the heading of epistemic contextualism. We take it as primarily a thesis about knowledge attribution, which retains a measure of autonomy from any specific account of knowledge. Other leading contextualists understand the variation of knowledge attributions in terms of a scale of (contextually provided) epistemic strength (DeRose 1992; Cohen 1987). Throughout the paper, by ‘contextualism’ (‘contextualist’) we mean ‘Lewisian contextualism (contextualist)’.

  2. Lewis’s favourite example of gradable adjective is ‘flat’ (as opposed to ‘bumpy’). The example is borrowed from (Unger 1975), who nevertheless takes the term as ‘absolute’ in the sense that it is inconsistent to say about two flat objects that one is flatter than the other.

  3. Of course, this does not make Descartes a contextualist; and indeed, as an invariantist he employs two distinct terms for knowledge—cognitio and scientia—in the mentioned passage.

  4. For a discussion of the so-called concessive knowledge attribution in fallibilism, see Dodd (2010).

  5. Lewis’s original definition is not metalinguistic and uses an except-clause which he calls ‘sotto voce proviso’. S’s evidence at a given time contains the totality of S’s current perceptual experiences and memory states; a possibility w is ‘eliminated’ by S’s evidence iff S’s entire perceptual experience and memory contains information incompatible with the w’s obtaining.

  6. Blome-Tillmann speaks for many in writing that for Lewis “any context in which one considers sceptical arguments is a context in which one does not properly ignore sceptical possibilities” (Blome-Tillmann 2009, p. 245).

  7. Suppose a chasm between philosophy and ordinary life. Then, it would be perfectly obvious why skeptical possibilities are relevant exclusively in the special environment of the philosophy classroom, if they are relevant within it. But it would still not be obvious that they are relevant within it. Quite the contrary; the strong pull of skeptical possibilities, as an ‘intramural’ one, now cries out for explanation: why do they interest philosophers in the first place? Granted, under the chasm, subjects migration from the outside to the inside of the seminar would not affect their epistemic integrity, any more than our bankruptcy in the game of Monopoly affects our financial integrity. But then the very compromise between ‘elusiveness’ in philosophy and ‘abundance’ in daily life would hold vacuously. Perhaps it is unclear how to even make sense of the point of having the verb ‘know’ in philosophical parlance, if its usage is so idiosyncratic (unlike the verb ‘mortgage’, say, in Monopoly). In sum, it is clear enough that the contextualist has no choice but to conclude that philosophy is not divorced from everyday life.

  8. Possibilities require some appropriate degree of specificity, not a ‘maximal’ one. What is ‘specific enough’, however, is vague matter. Lewis’s idea is that a specific enough possibility cannot be split into subcases dissimilar in some epistemologically relevant way.

  9. Cf. (Russell 1948, p. 170). The Rule of Resemblance admits an exception in order to avoid jumping into skepticism with both feet: skeptical possibilities cannot become relevant just because they resemble the possibilities that actually obtain by virtue of the fact that they cannot be eliminated by the subject’s evidence.

  10. Thanks for an anonymous referee for pressing us to understand this example in relation to the Rule of Resemblance.

  11. “A possibility not ignored at all is ipso facto not properly ignored [\(\dots \)] No matter how far-fetched a certain possibility may be, no matter how properly we might have ignored it in some other context, if in this context we are not in fact ignoring it but attending to it, then for us now it is a relevant alternative” (Lewis 1996, p. 559).

  12. This point seems implicit in Lewis’s remark that “the epistemology we’ve just been doing, at any rate, soon became an investigation of the ignoring of possibilities. But to investigate the ignoring of them was ipso facto not to ignore them” (Lewis 1996, pp. 559–560).

  13. Lewis only admits that “the only place where belief and justification enter my story” is through the Rule of Belief (Lewis 1996, p. 556). The word itself ‘evidence’ seems to be a ghost of the link between justification and knowledge, which Lewis breaks without much ado. His quick argument amounts to the remark that since sometimes we don’t know how we know, we have in these cases unjustified beliefs that count as knowledge (p. 551). Yet, one might object that we could unwittingly have a justification for these beliefs. On this point see Neta (2003, pp. 11–12) . More generally, one might also submit that ‘evaluation’ or ‘attribution’ connote a judgement with a belief-like structure.

  14. For example, the possibility that the cake bought for the party is made without buckwheat flour counts as ‘discovered’ by Fred, if he remembers that one of his guests has a serious allergy to buckwheat.

  15. It would take us too far to pursue this point further, but the assumption may be defended on the basis of the evidential parity between skeptical possibilities and their counterpossibilities.

  16. A similar case has been discussed in (Blome-Tillmann 2009, p. 246) and (Kenna 2009, p. 743). Kenna understands it as showing that “an alternative that is being attended to in a context [...] can be irrelevant” (ibidem). Our reading is slightly different (see infra).

  17. This has been noted by Kenna (2009, p. 743).

  18. Here Lewis misconstrues the role of d-ignoring, which he calls “make-believe ignoring”: “we would ignore the far-fetched possibility if we could – but can we? Perhaps at first our attempted ignoring would be make-believe ignoring, or self-deceptive ignoring; later, perhaps, it might ripen into genuine ignoring. But in the meantime, do we know? There may be no definite answer...” (Lewis 1996, p. 560).

  19. To take a dramatic example, consider how in the 1950s the Tobacco Manufacturers Standing Committee used R. A. Fischer’s claim that scientists did not know that smoking causes cancer since they did not eliminate the possibility that a smoker’s gene causes both a desire to smoke and lung cancer. See Sorensen (2004).

  20. However, the analogy between ‘knows’ and context-sensitive adjectives, like every analogy, sooner or later breaks down: when people disagree about whether the predicate ‘knows’ is instantiated in a given circumstance, they consider the dispute as in principle amenable to resolution. But in case of dissonant beliefs about the correct application of ‘elegant’ disputants do not presume to resolve the issue.

  21. Consider a case involving a shift in context. Dancer Olga lives in Vologda, in the Northwest of Russia; the next day she is going to an audition for the Bolshoi Ballett in Moscow. After looking at the train timetable on the railway website, she may truly claim that she knows that \(p\,[\)= the train to Moscow leaves at six a.m.\(]\). Suppose that Olga raises the possibility that the railway website is unreliable. By raising this possibility in her soliloquy, Olga changes the context to a new one in which this uneliminated possibility is relevant. Thus, she doesn’t know better, as she has simply changed the context. For a discussion of comparative knowledge in Lewisian contextualism, see Douven (2004).

  22. Readers of the online article ‘Pink pigeon in London baffles bird experts’ (www.telegraph.co.uk, 10 August 2012) would arrive at that possibility through the Rule of Discovery.

  23. On a recent discussion of the relationship between abduction and modality see Biggs (2011).

  24. As concerns the rules fixing the membership to the set of relevant possibilities, Rule of Discovery replaces Rule of Attention.

  25. Lewis quotes approvingly Colin Radford’s case of “the timid student about p who knows the answer but has no confidence that he has it right, and so does not believe what he knows”. This is striking: the timid student’s evidence, by hypothesis, is powerless to exclude the possibility that \(\lnot p\), otherwise the student would not be timid or unconfident at all. See also Ichikawa (2011) on putting a belief condition in a neo-Lewisian contextualism.

  26. What charactherizes the post-Gettier discussion of a barrage of epistemic luck attributions vs. knowledge attributions is an information asymmetry: crucial information about a sequence of events, which pertains to the subject’s environment, is available to the evaluator while being withheld from the subject. This information asymmetry is nicely discussed in Fogelin (1994).

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Piazza, M., Dolcini, N. Possibilities regained: neo-Lewisian contextualism and ordinary life. Synthese 197, 4887–4906 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0963-2

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