The rule ‘Keep your promises’ is often presented as a challenge to consequentialism, because the ground of your moral obligation not to break a promise seems to lie in the past fact that you made the promise, which is not a consequence of the act. A different picture emerges, however, when we move beyond the question of whether you have any moral obligation at all to the related question of how strong that obligation is.If I promise to meet you and (...) some other mutual friends for a casual lunch, then my moral obligation to meet you is not as strong as when I promise to drive you to the airport to catch an important flight. Why not? The natural answer is that, if I break the lunch promise, not much bad will happen. You will still have a pleasant lunch with our other friends, and you and I can still have lunch some other time. I have some moral obligation to meet you, but not a very strong one. In contrast, if I break my driving promise, then my failure will cause much more harm, assuming that you will not find another way to get to the airport in time for your flight. These harmful consequences to you seem to be what give strength to my moral obligation to keep this promise.The relevant kind of strength is measured by how much is needed to override the obligation. I would need much stronger reasons to justify breaking my promise to drive you to the airport than to justify breaking my promise to meet you for lunch. The fact that my teenage child is sick at home might be enough to justify missing the lunch, even if the teenager would be safe at …. (shrink)

The use of ‘S knows p’ varies from context to context. The contextualist theories of Cohen, Lewis, and DeRose explain this variation in terms of semantic hypotheses: ‘S knows p’ is indexical in meaning, referring to features of the ascriber’s context like salience, interests, and stakes. The linguistic evidence against contextualism is extensive. I maintain that the contextual variation of knowledge claims results from pragmatic factors. One is variable strictness :395–438, 2007). In addition to its strict use, ‘S knows p’ (...) may be used loosely to implicate that S is close enough to knowing p for contextually indicated purposes. Here I explore another variable: belief about what is known. This factor is pragmatic rather than semantic in that it affects the use of ‘S knows p’ without affecting its truth conditions. While variation in strictness accounts for the variation in the bank, parking, and some lottery cases, variation in belief accounts for the variation in other lottery cases and the epistemology cases. Along the way, I sketch an insensitive invariantist semantics that is strict but non-skeptical, and show how it works with these pragmatic factors. (shrink)

There is an apparent problem stemming from the factivity of knowledge that seems to afflict both contextualism and subject-sensitive invariantism . 1 In this article, we will first explain how the problem arises for each theory, and then we will propose a uniform resolution.1. The factivity problem for contextualismLet K t stands for X knows _ at t. Let h stand for S has hands. According to contextualism, ‘K t’ is true as uttered in some ordinary conversational contexts. Let O (...) be such a context. So we have ‘K t’ is true in O.Consider a demanding conversational context D . Let S* be a participant in D. We have ‘K t’ is not true in D.In prose: ‘S* knows at t that S has hands’ is not true in D. 2 , 3 Let us suppose that S* has a favourable epistemic status with respect to , as follows: ‘K t[S*,‘K t’ is true in O]’ is true in D. says that a certain sentence about S*'s epistemic status at t is true in D. S*'s epistemic status with respect to which proposition? A certain metalinguistic proposition concerning the truth in O of the sentence ‘K t’. That sentence in turn concerns S's epistemic status at t with respect to the proposition that S has hands. Got it? 4The factivity of ‘knows’ yields the following consequence : ‘K t’ is true in O → hThis metalinguistic factivity claim is licensed by the fact that any sentence of the …. (shrink)

The possibility of knowledge attributions across contexts (where attributor and subject find themselves in different epistemic contexts) can create serious problems for certain views of knowledge. Amongst such views is subject—sensitive invariantism—the view that knowledge is determined not only by epistemic factors (belief, truth, evidence, etc.) but also by non—epistemic factors (practical interests, etc.). I argue that subject—sensitive invariantism either runs into a contradiction or has to make very implausible assumptions. The problem has been very much neglected but is so (...) serious that one should look for alternative accounts of knowledge. (shrink)

(No abstract is available for this citation).

Epistemological contextualism ‐ the claim that the truth‐value of knowledge‐attributions can vary with the context of the attributor ‐ has recently faced a whole series of objections. The most serious one, however, has not been discussed much so far: the factivity objection. In this paper, I explain what the objection is and present three different versions of the objection. I then show that there is a good way out for the contextualist. However, in order to solve the problem the contextualist (...) has to accept a relationalist version of contextualism. (shrink)