Philosophical Studies

, Volume 135, Issue 2, pp 225–254 | Cite as

From Epistemic Contextualism to Epistemic Expressivism

Article

Abstract

In this paper, I exploit the parallel between epistemic contextualism and metaethical speaker-relativism to argue that a promising way out of two of the primary problems facing contextualism is one already explored in some detail in the ethical case – viz. expressivism. The upshot is an argument for a form of epistemic expressivism modeled on a familiar form of ethical expressivism. This provides a new nondescriptivist option for understanding the meaning of knowledge attributions, which arguably better captures the normative nature of epistemic discourse than descriptivist competitors like invariantism and contextualism.

Keywords

Knowledge Claim Knowledge Attribution Epistemic Norm Moral System Epistemic Standard 
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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Copyright information

© Springer 2006

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Department of PhilosophyUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, University of North CarolinaChaper HillUSA

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