Abstract
In this paper we lay out the conceptual and technical foundations of a general framework that will allow us to talk and reason about the connections between knowledge and context. Based on the notion of “contextual models” !contextual , a first section on “static formalism ” will make it possible to capture using the same language and the same semantics , a number of epistemological positions amongst those most prominent in the recent philosophical literature on knowledge , and to investigate the logical properties and connections they end up attaching to their respective notions of knowledge and context . This “static” component is augmented with a “dynamic” formalization of context based on a simplified version of Discourse Representation Theory, which will allow us to account for the contribution of epistemic statements to the evolution of the “score” of a conversation about knowledge .
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Notes
- 1.
It is very common in the literature to find this position associated with the name G. E. Moore, and for this reason called “Moorean invariantism”. We find it more convenient to refer to Austin instead.
- 2.
We mention all four logically possible options here for the sake of exhaustiveness, although we will not examine all of them. To be precise, option 2.1 will not be relevant to our purpose. See Footnote 6.
- 3.
- 4.
Note in passing that they make the epistemic relevance set constant across worlds too, differing in this respect from “non-absolutist”, “circumstance-sensitive” forms of invariantism à la Dretske or Nozick, not treated here.
- 5.
Here, some proponents of contextualism might disagree, as they would be willing to maintain that contextualism is true despite most people lacking awareness of this fact, and being semantically blind to the context-dependence of knowledge ascriptions ascription. This is how, for instance, DeRose seems to conceive of the position. In Lihoreau and Rebuschi (2009), we insist on the distinction between these two construals of the contextualist stance and explore their respective bearings on the issue of epistemic factivity.
- 6.
As mentioned in Footnote 2, for our purposes, we do not need definition (2.1):
$$\displaystyle{ \mathcal{M},c_{i},w\models _{2.1}K_{i}\varphi \ \mathrm{iff\ for\ every}\ w^\prime,\ \mathrm{ if}\ \mathcal{K}_{j}ww^\prime\ \mathrm{and}\ w^\prime \in \mathcal{R}(c_{j})(w)\ \mathrm{then}\ \mathcal{M},c_{i},w^\prime\models \varphi }$$which says that I (attributor) can truly say that you (=subject) know that \(\varphi\) when I can truly say, against your epistemic standards, that given your evidence, you know that \(\varphi\). It might, however, prove useful if we augmented the non-modal part of the language with indexical expressions in order to account for such knowledge ascriptions ascription as “So-and-so knows that I am here” or “I know that you are there”.
- 7.
- 8.
Work in this vein can be found in our paper on “contextual epistemic !epistemic logic” (Rebuschi and Lihoreau 2008).
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Lihoreau, F., Rebuschi, M. (2014). Reasoning About Knowledge in Context. In: Rebuschi, M., Batt, M., Heinzmann, G., Lihoreau, F., Musiol, M., Trognon, A. (eds) Interdisciplinary Works in Logic, Epistemology, Psychology and Linguistics. Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-03044-9_7
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