Abstract
The paper discusses approaches to Epistemic Contextualism that model the satisfaction of the predicate ‘know’ in a given context C in terms of the notion of belief/fact-matching throughout a contextually specified similarity sphere of worlds that is centred on actuality. The paper offers three counterexamples to approaches of this type and argues that they lead to insurmountable difficulties. I conclude that what contextualists (and Subject-Sensitive Invariantists) have traditionally called the ‘epistemic standards’ of a given context C cannot be explicated in terms of a contextually specified similarity sphere that is centred on actuality. The mentioned accounts of epistemic relevance and thus the corresponding accounts of the context-sensitivity (or subject-sensitivity) of ‘knows’ are to be rejected.
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Notes
DeRose (1995, p. 201).
See DeRose (1992, p. 922; DeRose’s emphasis).
DeRose (1995, section 11, p. 204; symbolism adjusted).
Actuality is the world that is closest to itself, resembling itself more than any other world resembles it.
See Lewis (1973, pp. 50–52) for discussion of whether the similarity between worlds can be measured numerically.
See DeRose (2004, pp. 33–35).
DeRose (1995, p. 206; symbolism adjusted, my emphasis). DeRose uses the phrase ‘truth-tracking’ instead of ‘belief/fact-matching’. See Sect. 3 for a discussion of the interrelations between sensitivity accounts of knowledge and DeRose’s contextualist approach. See also Mark Heller (1989, 1999), who takes a very similar approach to EC and epistemic relevance as DeRose’s does.
Since, on DeRose’s view, a context’s similarity sphere of epistemically relevant worlds is centred on actuality, actuality is epistemically relevant in every context. Thus, no false belief can be ‘knowledge’ and it would therefore be redundant to add a truth-condition to (D).
Ibid. (p. 206; symbolism adjusted). The normative tone of this formulation is, of course, misleading.
I use ‘□→’ to express the counterfactual conditional.
Translated into natural language, (SENS) claims that if one knows p, then if p had not been the case, one would not have believed p.
It is, of course, this feature of DeRose’s account that allows him to retain a contextualised version of closure.
In natural language, (SAFE) claims that if one knows p, then if one were to believe p, then p would be the case. Note that (SAFE) and (SENS) place different constraints on knowledge: while (SAFE) demands that one’s belief could not have been false easily, (SENS) demands that one would not have believed p, if p had not been the case. Counterfactual conditionals do not contrapose.
I assume that DeRose would consider belief/fact matching throughout the similarity sphere picked out by the counterfactual conditional in (SAFE) a minimal condition on the satisfaction of ‘know’ for any given context, the contextualist point being that the sphere of epistemically relevant worlds is, in some contexts, larger than the minimal one required for all contexts. I ignore cases that turn out problematic for DeRose and (SAFE), such as Harman’s assassination case (see Harman 1973, pp. 142–154).
In his (1995, p. 207) DeRose claims, with reference to Nozick’s tracking theory of knowledge, that “[t]he notion of sensitivity [...] finds its happier home in our contextualist account of how the standards for knowledge are raised.” This is, of course, a misrepresentation of his own views, and the term ‘Rule of Sensitivity’ is, strictly speaking, a misnomer: DeRose’s account is not a “contextualised tracking account of knowledge”. It should be noted here, however, that DeRose himself has pointed out in more recent writings that his account is a contextualised safety account (see, for instance, DeRose (2004)).
I assume that V&G takes place in a perfectly ordinary zoo in which the animals in the zebra pen are in fact zebras and that the quantified noun phrase in Vladimir’s last assertion is appropriately contextually restricted.
Cf. Cohen (1999, p. 72) for the view that the actual laws of nature fail only in rather distant worlds. Lewis (1979, p. 468) does not agree that worlds in which the laws of nature are violated are inevitably far away from actuality. According to Lewis, worlds in which two ‘miracles’ occur, i.e. minute violations of the laws of nature that cancel each other out, can be relatively close. As will become obvious later, the assumption that worlds with different laws of nature are farther away from α than w′ is not essential to my argument.
It might be argued that Gogo’s last assertion triggers a downwards shift in epistemic standards, and that his assertion therefore comes out true. Such a strategy, however, is troubled by conjunctive ‘knowledge’-ascriptions such as ‘Gogo knows both that nothing travels faster than light and that the animals in the pen are zebras’. On the view at issue, such assertions must turn out false, which is certainly absurd enough for a reductio. Another important problem that the defender of DeRose’s approach needs to address concerns knowledge of necessary truths. If a speaker ascribes or denies ‘knowledge’ of the necessary proposition p, do all possible worlds become epistemically relevant, simply because there is no closest \(\neg p\)-world? And which effect have assertions of the form ‘x knows that actually p’, where p is contingent while actually-p is necessary?
Ernest Sosa emphasised in his 2005 Locke Lectures that worlds in which one dreams are rather close to α. But if you are still unconvinced that w is farther away from α than my sceptical worlds, we could construe other examples in which Gogo asserts, for instance, ‘I (don’t) know that nobody can freeze objects by blowing on them when thinking of a white bear’ instead of ‘I didn’t know that [nothing can travel faster than light]’. Surely the closest world in which people can freeze objects by blowing on them when thinking of a white bear are farther out in modal space than any of the sceptical worlds w′, w biv or w d .
If giving an account of closeness D amounts to giving an account of epistemic relevance, this renders superfluous the Rule of Sensitivity.
I am grateful to Stewart Cohen here, who drew my attention to the response discussed in the following paragraphs.
DeRose might be willing to bite the bullet here, individuate propositions coarsely (in terms of sets of possible worlds) and claim that there is only one necessary proposition which is, as Lewis puts it, “known always and everywhere” (Lewis 1996, p. 223). Such a response, however, would still be insufficient, for accounts pairing the conjunction of (D*) and (RS*) with (M) are also troubled by examples such as Harman’s assassination case, where p is true in all nearby worlds but it is only by a fluke that one does not encounter the misleading counterevidence which could so easily have led one to give up one’s belief (see Harman 1973, pp. 142–154).
In fact, this is the notion that DeRose’s formulation suggests when he claims that epistemically strong beliefs “match the fact of the matter as to whether p is true, not only in the actual world, but also at the worlds sufficiently close to the actual world.” (DeRose 1995, p. 204 (my emphasis)).
Consider also the proposition that you are a biv with hands (‘biv h ’). If you assert the sentence ‘I don’t know \(\neg biv_{h}\)’, your assertion does not, according to (RS*), change the sphere of worlds associated with the proposition that you have hands (‘h’), since h does not entail \(\neg biv_{h}\). Thus, you can truthfully assert: ‘I don’t know that I’m not a biv with hands, and that’s why I don’t know that I have feet, legs, a nose or ears; but, thank God, I know that I have hands’.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Brain Ball, Stewart Cohen, Dorothy Edgington, Tim Williamson and Ralph Wedgwood.
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Blome-Tillmann, M. Contextualism, safety and epistemic relevance. Philos Stud 143, 383–394 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9206-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9206-4