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Notes
As opposed to claims about knowledge, or who knows what: epistemic contextualism (EC) is a semantic thesis about the truth conditional contents of the propositions expressed by certain sentences—viz., that they are ‘context’-dependent and—variable: in itself, EC is silent about knowledge. For discussion of this and other points, arguments and issues surrounding EC, see Rysiew 2007a.
This is a misleading way of putting it since, according to EC, there is no one knowledge relation—at least, no unrelativized one—that all occurrences of ‘know(s)’ pick out (cf. previous note; Bach 2005, Section 1). Fortunately, this doesn’t affect the current discussion.
Version cited: http://pantheon.yale.edu/%7Ekd47/Contextualism%20and%20X-Phi-10-10.pdf. Last accessed 26 Aug 2011.
DeRose’s is most explicit about what makes for “the best cases” at 2009, 53ff., 155ff; in the present paper, see p. 3.
The other two such studies are, for reasons DeRose gives (pp. 18–25), not after all clearly relevant to arguing for contrastivism.
Whether this suffices to make contrastivism a form of EC is most likely a terminological issue. (For Schaffer on the differences between contrastivism and canonical versions of EC, see his 2004.) Here, purely for the sake of ease of reference in differentiating between contrastivism and more standard forms of EC—such as have been endorsed by DeRose, Stewart Cohen, and others—I’ll tend to use ‘contextualism’ to refer to the latter.
S&K (Section 6.3) anticipate an attempt to explain the results in the ‘context’ case in terms of conversational pragmatics, one that’s styled after Rysiew (2001) and Brown (2006). While they think the imagined view represents “an interesting and plausible strategy”, they register two objections to it: it cannot explain why we would deny certain claims, they think, and it fails the cancelability test. Brown (2006) and Rysiew (2001, 2005, Section 3; 2007b, Section 4) have responded to just these worries about their views. However, as discussed, it is doubtful that any very sophisticated theory is required for handling the ‘context sensitivity’ case.
This and other recent studies have been the subject of a lot of web discussion among philosophers. That the subjects in the thief contrast case may well be picking up on a presupposition about what was stolen and reading it into the story itself is among the ideas floated at Certain Doubts, by Aaron Zimmerman and Jennifer Nagel in particular: http://el-prod.baylor.edu/certain_doubts/?p=908.
Though I do think that care should be taken in articulating just what the intuitions are, exactly—whether, e.g., it’s that both of the relevant claims are true (flat-out), that they each enjoy some intuitive plausibility, that what the subject “says” in both cases is “correct” or “appropriate”, or what. In stating what is uncontroversial in this regard, I myself have put it in deliberately weak, and so (it’s hoped) uncontentious, terms—for instance, by saying that the Bank Case, e.g., “illustrates the fact that there is a manifest flexibility in our willingness to attribute knowledge, whether to ourselves or to others: it is incontrovertible that, in some sense anyway, “what counts as knowing” depends upon ‘context’” (Rysiew 2001, 477–478).
Another possibility here—one that DeRose doesn’t consider but which complements his discussion—is that subjects are taking cues from the structure of the questionnaire itself: when they are asked to indicate how strongly they agree with the sentence “When Hanna says, ‘I know [/don’t know] that they bank will be open tomorrow,’ what she says is true” by selecting a value on a 7-point Likert scale, that itself might be taken to suggest that the matter is not straightforward but complex (see Cullen, forthcoming, Section 3.3.1); if so, in the absence of a clear grasp of what such complexities are, much less how to negotiate them, subjects might naturally default towards the ‘safe’, neutral response.
For further discussion, see Rysiew 2007a, Section 4.3.
Nor is it to say that subjects and their judgments can’t be tutored to a large degree, or that carefully crafted probes—where sensitivity to the relevant distinctions is built into the survey itself, as it were—can’t themselves do the work of philosophical savvy on the part of subjects, reliably eliciting their views on the desired issues.
Such an insistence follows immediately after the remark just quoted. DeRose writes: “However, at least with regard to many cases, the intuition about whether a claim involving ‘know(s)’ made in the examples is true can at least be fairly strong, and when that intuition can be buttressed in the ways we are about to investigate, I think it can become the basis of a strong philosophical argument” (2009, 50, n. 2).
For some of which, see Rysiew 2007a. My own reaction to EC is rather like DeRose’s position on epistemic aspectism (see above): in spite of whatever intuitive pull the relevant claims enjoy, those intuitions—especially as concerns the sense that the HIGH denial is “correct” (to use a neutral term)—conflict with other things that are in my view much more strongly grounded; and they can, moreover, be accommodated otherwise than by taking them as all face-value true.
Compare DeRose, discussing aspectism: “The issue has always seemed to me to be one of finding the best resolution of such conflicts [among intuitions]…. Key to the construction of resolutions to these conflicts is not just measuring the degree to which the various claims are intuitively plausible, but also, vitally, accounts of the meanings of and connections between the various relevant forms of knowledge claims, by which the intuitive plausibility of the various claims can be explained—and sometimes explained away” (p. 29).
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Acknowledgments
My thanks to the Oberlin Colloquium organizers and attendees; special thanks to Keith DeRose, Cindy Holder, Jennifer Nagel, and Joel Pust.
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Rysiew, P. Surveys, intuitions, knowledge attributions. Philos Stud 156, 111–120 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9804-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9804-4