Abstract
The semantic blindness objection to contextualism challenges the view that there is no incompatibility between (i) denials of external-world knowledge in contexts where radical-deception scenarios are salient, and (ii) affirmations of external-world knowledge in contexts where such scenarios are not salient. Contextualism allegedly attributes a gross and implausible form of semantic incompetence in the use of the concept of knowledge to people who are otherwise quite competent in its use; this blindness supposedly consists in wrongly judging that there is genuine conflict between claims of type (i) and type (ii). We distinguish two broad versions of contextualism: relativistic-content contextualism and categorical-content contextualism. We argue that although the semantic blindness objection evidently is applicable to the former, it does not apply to the latter. We describe a subtle form of conflict between claims of types (i) and (ii), which we call différance-based affirmatory conflict. We argue that people confronted with radical-deception scenarios are prone to experience a form of semantic myopia (as we call it): a failure to distinguish between différance-based affirmatory conflict and outright inconsistency. Attributing such semantic myopia to people who are otherwise competent with the concept of knowledge explains the bafflement about knowledge-claims that so often arises when radical-deception scenarios are made salient. Such myopia is not some crude form of semantic blindness at all; rather, it is an understandable mistake grounded in semantic competence itself: what we call a competence-based performance error.
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Notes
Essentially this same point is stressed by DeRose (2006).
Although knowledge-contextualists sometimes write as though they believe that the contextual salience of a radical-deception scenario automatically drives the implicit parameters governing the fine-grained semantics of ‘know’ to a maximally demanding setting, we ourselves would deny that this is so. One can stand one’s ground in such a context if one chooses to do so, and one can persist in using ‘know’ under more typical parameter-settings. Thus, one can correctly say (for example), “I know I have hands, even though my evidence for this claim would be exactly the same even if I were an envatted brain.”
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Horgan, T., Potrč, M. Epistemological Skepticism, Semantic Blindness, and Competence-Based Performance Errors. Acta Anal 28, 161–177 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-012-0164-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-012-0164-2