This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
There are of course some disagreements about intuitions. For example, in my review of (Stanley 2005), I report a difference of intuition I have with Jason Stanley concerning one of Stanley’s key cases (DeRose 2007: 486). Still, the debate is fairly characterized as one primarily concerned with how to handle certain intuitions, rather than over what the relevant intuitions are.
At p. 11, S&K describe the earlier studies they discuss as a “recent wave of empirical research calling those claims [made by contextualists and some of their opponents about our intuitions] into doubt.”
S&K also discuss a fifth study, Beebe and Buckwalter, but this one concerns another issue and isn’t taken by anyone to undermine the case for contextualism.
This argument is described and executed mainly at (DeRose 2005 ≅ 2009: Chap. 2), though the argument is completed at (DeRose 2002 ≅ 2009: Chap. 3), where I battle against the most popular way of attempting to evade it. For reasons I give at (DeRose 2005: 181–187 ≅ 2009: 59–66), it is better for the argument not to be based on cases featuring first-person knowledge claims like my original bank cases, so I actually instead base it on different case pairs that feature third-person knowledge attributions. At (DeRose 2002 ≅ 2009: Chap. 3) I also give a second argument for contextualism (the presentation of which is significantly improved in the 2009 version).
These intuitions, I claim, are one of two mutually supporting strands of support for the key premises of the argument. For further discussion, including an explanation of what the other strand of support is, and of the relation between these two strands of support, see (DeRose 2005: 172–174 ≅ 2009: 49–52).
See DeRose (2005: 188–190 ≅ 2009: 238–241).
An early version of Buckwalter’s paper asked directly whether characters in his stories knew things to be the case, and Buckwalter presented his results as undermining my case for contextualism. When Buckwalter posted this earlier version of his paper on the “Experimental Philosophy” web site, it inspired a spirited and interesting discussion in the comments to the web blog entry that Buckwalter posted: “Knowledge on Saturday,” posted July 26, 2008; currently at: http://www.experimentalphilosophy.typepad.com/experimental_philosophy/2008/07/knowledge-on-sa.html
The current version of Buckwalter’s paper now instead asks about the truth-values of claims made within his stories—I presume due to the on-line discussion just mentioned.
I don’t believe x-phi surveys of the type we’re discussing here are tests of how speakers tend to use terms. These surveys are set up to test intuitions about the correctness of certain statements. These two issues seem to get conflated in some of the x-phi literature—especially by S&K. Consider, from their “Conclusion”:
The existing debate over contextualism is based in large part on claims about what ordinary speakers will say about bank cases (§1). But these claims do not survive empirical scrutiny. Ordinary speakers do not say what philosophers say they will say (§2).
The empirical data about what ordinary speakers will say suggest that our intuitions are in fact sensitive to contrasts and salient error possibilities, but insensitive to stakes (§§4–5).
Here S&K start by speaking about appeals to how speakers use “know(s),” but think such appeals are refuted by data concerning respondents’ intuitions about how to evaluate certain claims. But how one evaluates a claim one is asked to evaluate is one thing; how one would oneself describe a situation is, at least on the face of it, quite another thing.
There is also the question of whether the speakers in Buckwalter’s versions really would be speaking inappropriately. We cannot assume that because a certain claim is appropriate, the opposite claim would be inappropriate. It could happen that while asserting “P” would be more appropriate than asserting “not-P,” the latter wouldn’t be all that bad. In fact, in some cases, a speaker can appropriately assert either “P” or “not-P”—and in fact, I think it can often happen that either assertion would be true, for reasons we’re about to see in the next couple of paragraphs.
I should point out in fairness to Buckwalter that we are now into material that was new to DeRose (2009), and so was not something Buckwalter had access to as he conducted his study. Any reference to my previous work in this section for which I give only a 2009 reference is material that was new to that work. At the same time, this was material I had written into 2009 before I had ever heard of Buckwalter’s study.
I’ve encountered some philosophers who think I don’t believe in rules of accommodation, apparently because I reject a solution to a skeptical problem that’s based on such a rule at DeRose (1995: 7–13). But I am only arguing there that an appeal to such a rule cannot provide the kind of explanation we should be seeking in solving the skeptical problem I am there wrestling with, not that rules of accommodation don’t exist—or even that they aren’t operating to the skeptic’s benefit in presentations of skeptical arguments. Indeed, though this is (perhaps unfortunately) in a footnote, I write: “None of this is to deny that there is some Rule of Accommodation according to which the standards for knowledge tend to be raised to ‘accommodate’ denials of knowledge. Nor is it even to deny that such Rules of Accommodation help the AI skeptic. In fact, I find it plausible to suppose that many denials of knowledge, including those of AI skeptics, often do exert an upward pressure on the standards for knowledge via some such rule.” (DeRose 2005: p. 10, n. 14).
To be sure, I haven’t before explicitly expressed doubts about whether differences in stakes alone affect epistemic standards. But as we’re about to see, I have expressed views that would tend to cast some doubt over any confident prediction here.
I have in mind here the kind of general issues about survey methodology that have been prominently discussed by Norbert Schwarz; see Schwarz (1995), (1996), and Schwarz et al. (1991). Simon Cullen presses this criticism against X-Phi (though he does not discuss the works we have been looking at) in his (forthcoming). He argues:
Experimental philosophers can effectively equate survey responses with intuitions only by ignoring the established social and cognitive science literature on survey methodology. In my review of the growing body of experimental philosophy literature I have found just one reference to a serious discussion of survey methodology.* The conclusion to be drawn is that, despite their pretensions, many experimental philosophers have given no serious thought to methodology. This not only undermines their claim to be doing science, as we shall see, it often leaves the philosophical significance of their findings unclear.
In a note that is attached to the point in the above marked *, Cullen reports:
Searching all of the electronic scholarly resources accessible from Melbourne University—which include all major philosophy, psychology, social and cognitive science journals—for the terms [“experimental philosophy” “survey methodology”] turned up only two results, neither of which contained a discussion of survey methodology. Searching for [Schwarz “Experimental philosophy”] yielded two additional results: Goldman and Pust (1998) who cite Schwarz (1995) in their defence of intuitions; and Doris et al. (2007) who cite Schwarz (1996).
My methodologically-based pessimism about the bearing of the experimental work we’ve been considering on the philosophical debate is based on intriguing unpublished work, critical of the literature we have been considering, by Jennifer Nagel, who is indeed far more expert in survey methodology than I am.
S&K (forthcoming): 27. S&K note that this possibility was pointed out to them by Jennifer Nagel and they cite Sanford and Sturt (2002) and Sanford et al. (2006) as sources on the phenomenon.
In my case, my initially frustrating experience was with an on-line survey I was asked by e-mail to fill out by a former employer. At the beginning, I had no idea why I was being asked the questions on the survey. It seemed to be a fairly long survey (both with many questions, and also in terms of many of the individual questions being a bit complicated), so I didn’t want to mull over each question for very long. I didn’t feel very good about the fairly rushed answers I found myself giving toward the beginning of the survey, and found myself often giving fairly “neutral” answers, (midway between “strongly agree” and “strongly disagree”), largely because I didn’t have a good feel for what the questions were “getting at.” A bit into the survey, I figured out that the institution was interested in reviewing various of their practices, with an eye toward changing them if need be. I suddenly felt much better about the answers I was giving, even when answering fairly quickly, and I was no longer opting for neutral answers out of a sense of confusion. A good hypothesis as to why this change took place is that once I knew the purpose behind the questions, I was better able to focus on and more adequately process the important elements of the questions I was being asked. I remember wanting to—but frustratingly being unable to—go back and redo the early portions of the survey.
This warning came from Jennifer Nagel. Some of the potential problems may come from there being a negation inside the claim being evaluated in HIGH.
I guess it’s a sign that I’m a true armchair philosopher at heart that I’m here discussing the bearing of the results of an experimental philosophy survey—that I’ve only imagined has been conducted!
I presume that when S&K set out to test for “contrast for the ascriber” impact, they tried to construct the case to be such as to make it very likely that such impact could be observed, if the factor in question ever has an impact. Similarly, then, my imagined experimental philosophers would test for “standards for the ascriber” impact by constructing a case designed to most likely register such an impact. I’m thinking this would be done by giving the possible knower in the example a level of evidence that would, for most speakers, put her in the intuitive “grey zone” between knowing and not knowing, and then asking them whether they agree with the statements I have above in the text.
The details of S&K’s survey are at S&K, p. 17, note 16.
I don’t want to make too much of these results counting against contrastivism. Though I presume (see note 20, above) that S&K designed their story to make an impact to be most likely to show up, there are problems with their story, like the one I mention at the end of Sect. 2.2, above, that may well explain why their results are so muted.
At least this divergence in truth values can happen according to typical contrastivist verdicts about the truth-values of the relevant “rather than” knowledge-ascribing sentences, which seem to be guided by something like what we can call this ‘contrastive-sensitivity’ condition: If S would have believed that p even if q had been the case, then it is not the case that S knows that p rather than q. Whether these verdicts are actually correct is a very tricky issue. For discussion, see DeRose (2009: 39–40, n. 37). I am here accepting such verdicts for the sake of argument. To reject them would be to alter contrastivism’s applications quite drastically from what contrastivists take them to be.
Dretske (1972), which I didn’t encounter until quite a few years after it came out; see especially pp. 435–437 for Dretske’s discussion of knowledge. Dretske didn’t consider all the forms of epistemic aspectism we’re discussing here; his focus was on what we’re here calling type-4 aspectism. But once one sees Dretske’s discussion, it doesn’t take much imagination to start wondering about other forms of epistemic aspectism.
References
Austin, J. L. (1946). Other minds. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 20, 149–187.
Beebe, J., & Buckwalter, W. The epistemic side-effect effect. Mind & Language, (forthcoming).
Buckwalter, W. Knowledge isn’t closed on Saturdays. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, (forthcoming).
Cullen, S. Survey-driven romanticism. European Review of Philosophy, (forthcoming).
DeRose, K. (1992). Contextualism and knowledge attributions. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 52, 913–929.
DeRose, K. (1995). Solving the skeptical problem. Philosophical Review, 104, 1–52.
DeRose, K. (2005). The ordinary language basis for contextualism and the new invariantism. Philosophical Quarterly, 55, 172–198.
DeRose, K. (2007). Review of stanley (2005). Mind, 116, 486–489.
DeRose, K. (2009). The case for contextualism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Doris, J. M., Knobe, J., & Woolfolk, R. L. (2007). Variantism about responsibility. Philosophical Perspectives, 21, 183–214.
Dretske, F. I. (1972). Contrastive statements. Philosophical Review, 81, 411–437.
Feltz, A., & Zarpentine, C. Do you know more when it matters less?” Philosophical Psychology, (forthcoming).
Goldman, A., & Pust, J. (1998). Philosophical theory and intuitional evidence. In W. Ramsey & M. DePaul (Eds.), Rethinking intuition. Totowa: Rowman & Littlefield.
Lewis, D. (1979). Scorekeeping in a language game. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 8, 339–359.
May, J., Sinnott-Armstrong, W., Hull, J. G., & Zimmerman, A. Practical interests, relevant alternatives, and knowledge attributions: An empirical study. Review of Philosophy and Psychology, (forthcoming).
Neta, R., & Phelan, M. (manuscript). Evidence that stakes don’t matter for evidence.
Schaffer, J., & Knobe, J. “Contrastivism surveyed,” Noûs. Page references are to the prepublication draft available on Knobe’s web site, accessed 6 January 2011, (forthcoming).
Schwarz, N. (1995). What respondents learn from questionnaires: The survey interview and the logic of conversation. International Statistical Review/Revue Internationale de Statistique, 63, 153–168.
Schwarz, N. (1996). Cognition and communication: Judgmental biases, research methods, and the logic of conversation. Erlbaum: Mahwah.
Schwarz, N., Fritz, S., & Hans-Peter, M. (1991). Assimilation and contrast effects in part-whole question sequences: A conversational logic analysis. The Public Opinion Quarterly, 55, 3–23.
Stanley, J. (2005). Knowledge and practical interests. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to the organizers of the 2010 Oberlin Philosophy Colloquium, where I delivered this paper, and to the participants at the conference, especially to Patrick Rysiew, my commentator. Thanks to Jennifer Nagel and to Jonathan Schaffer for very helpful comments on an earlier draft.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
DeRose, K. Contextualism, contrastivism, and X-Phi surveys. Philos Stud 156, 81–110 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9799-x
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9799-x