Abstract
The debate on epistemic contextualism has been mainly focused on the contextualist solutions to sceptical paradoxes, neglecting many questions that arise from the contextualist understanding of the semantic behaviour of knowledge ascriptions. One of those questions concerns the dynamics of contexts changes: it is not clear when contexts change and which conversational and epistemic mechanisms determine these variations. Here we will scrutinize four accounts of these mechanisms (Lewis’ view, the veto power view, the gap view, and the intentionalist view) identifying the virtues and the lacks of each position. We will conclude that Lewis’ view and the veto power view are both inadequate, and that the gap view provides the better account of the dynamics of contexts changes for it vindicates our intuition that in those cases where the conversational partners do not agree on which epistemic standard should be applied in their context they are contradicting one another.
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Notes
- 1.
The term “invariantism” is used to label the position of those who deny contextualism with respect to a certain class of statements - see Unger (1984). The invariantist about knowledge ascriptions maintains that the truth-conditions of these expressions do not change across contexts.
- 2.
The adequacy of both analogies has been contested. For the debate about which linguistic model better captures the context-sensitivity of knowledge ascriptions see Capellen and Lepore (2003), Stanley (2004, 2005), Hawthorne (2004), Bianchi and Vassallo (2005), Kompa (2005), Ludlow (2005), DeRose (2009), Stainton (2010), Jaster (2013).
- 3.
The notion of sensitivity of a belief is due to Nozick (1981).
- 4.
A remarkable example of this reading of contextualism is Stine (1976).
- 5.
Notice that the use of the veto power does not prevent the speakers from negotiating the epistemic standard that should be in place in their conversational context. Suppose that Tom and Louis are involved in a conversation where is in place the loose epistemic standard C 1 ; when Tom employs the veto power to prevent his conversational partner Louis to install the more demanding standard C 3 it can happen that after a discussion the two agree that in this case the more reasonable choice is to adopt the average standard C 2 .
- 6.
It should be noted, however, that according to the classical contextualist view the truth-conditions of a knowledge ascription strongly depend by the intentions of the ascriber, but do not totally depend on it, for the epistemic standard operative in a conversational context depends upon the intentions of all the conversational partners.
- 7.
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Leardi, S., Vassallo, N. (2017). When Do the Truth-Conditions of S Knows that p Change?. In: Brézillon, P., Turner, R., Penco, C. (eds) Modeling and Using Context. CONTEXT 2017. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10257. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57837-8_5
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