Traditionally, epistemologists have held that only truth-related factors matter in the question of whether a subject can be said to know a proposition. Various philosophers have recently departed from this doctrine by claiming that the answer to this question also depends on practical concerns. They take this move to be warranted by the fact that people’s knowledge attributions appear sensitive to contextual variation, in particular variation due to differing stakes. This paper proposes an alternative explanation of the aforementioned fact, one (...) that allows us to stick to the orthodoxy. The alternative applies the conceptual spaces approach to the concept of knowledge. With knowledge conceived of spatially, the variability in knowledge attributions follows from recent work on identity, according to which our standards for judging things (including concepts) to be identical are context-dependent. On the proposal to be made, it depends on what is at stake in a context whether it is worth distinguishing between knowing and being at least close to knowing. (shrink)

Abstract MacFarlane distinguishes “context sensitivity” from “indexicality,” and argues that “nonindexical contextualism” has significant advantages over the standard indexical form. MacFarlane’s substantive thesis is that the extension of an expression may depend on an epistemic standard variable even though its content does not. Focusing on ‘knows,’ I will argue against the possibility of extension dependence without content dependence when factors such as meaning, time, and world are held constant, and show that MacFarlane’s nonindexical contextualism provides no advantages over indexical contextualism. (...) The discussion will shed light on the definition of indexicals as well as the meaning of ‘knows,’ and highlight important constraints on the way meaning can be represented in semantics. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-14 DOI 10.1007/s11098-011-9831-1 Authors Wayne A. Davis, Georgetown University, Washington, DC, USA Journal Philosophical Studies Online ISSN 1573-0883 Print ISSN 0031-8116. (shrink)

I critically examine Cappelen and Lepore’s definition of and tests for indexicality, and refine them to improve their adequacy. Indexicals cannot be defined as expressions with different referents in different contexts unless linguistic meaning and circumstances of evaluation are held constant. I show that despite Cappelen and Lepore’s claim that there are only a handful of indexical expressions, their “basic set” includes a number of large and open classes, and generates an infinity of indexical phrases. And while the tests can (...) be used effectively to combat contextualism concerning ‘knows’ and ‘actual,’ many expressions not in their basic set test positive for indexicality, including quantifier nouns, weather reports, and comparative adjectives. I rebut their claim that context-shifting arguments inevitably lead to radical contextualism, and that if there were any indexicals beyond their basic set, communication would be impossible. (shrink)

Russell ([2022]. “Fancy Loose Talk About Knowledge.” Inquiry 65: 789–820.) defends a novel form of skeptical invariantism, according to which knowledge ascriptions are hardly ever true because they are so demanding, but nonetheless are ordinarily used loosely to communicate truths, where the felicity of loose talk is relative to the context of assessment as well as the context of use. I argue that while there is very good reason to believe that ‘know’ is a demanding term commonly used loosely, we (...) need not and should not conclude that loose use is assessment relative or that knowledge ascriptions are hardly ever true. (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)

Infallibilism is commonly rejected because it is apparently subject to easy counter-examples. I describe a strategy that infallibilists can use to resist this objection. Because the sentences used in the counter-examples to express evidence and belief are context-sensitive, the infallibilist can insist that such counter-examples trade on a vacillation between different readings of these sentences. I describe what difficulties await those who try to produce counter-examples against which the proposed strategy is ineffective.

Grice’s Razor is a methodological principle that many philosophers and linguists have used to help justify pragmatic explanations of linguistic phenomena over semantic explanations. A number of authors in the debate over contextualism argue that an invariant semantics together with Grice’s (1975) conversational principles can account for the contextual variability of knowledge claims. I show here that the defense of Grice’s Razor found in these “Gricean invariantists,” and its use against epistemic contextualism, display all the problems pointed out earlier in (...) Davis (1998). The everyday variation in acceptable knowledge claims is better explained in terms of implicature than indexicality, but general conversational principles shed little light on whether ‘know’ is used hyperbolically, meiotically, or loosely in a context, although this issue is crucial in deciding what if anything ‘S knows p’ implicates. I present reasons favoring an account of the representative bank case in terms of loose use, making clear how they differ from Grice’s Razor. (shrink)

In “How to Be an Infallibilist,” Julien Dutant (2016, 149) presents a simple and seemingly plausible argument that knowledge requires infallible belief—roughly, belief that could not be mistaken. As Dutant recognizes, infallibilism is almost universally dismissed, in large part because it seems to rule out any knowledge of the physical world. He seeks to show how we can be an Infallibilist without being a skeptic, based on the assumption that knowledge has a safety condition. I critically examine each line of (...) Dutant’s argument, showing that the argument is unsound on any plausible interpretation. I also question the idea that knowledge cannot be the conjunction of true belief and a nonfactive condition, that any belief about the physical world could not be false, and that any nonskeptical alternative to infallibilism would have to allow knowledge of chancy outcomes. I briefly suggest that a fallibilist account can be strict enough to satisfy the Infallibilist’s quest for certainty. (shrink)

In non‐literal uses of language, the content an utterance communicates differs from its literal truth conditions. Loose talk is one example of non‐literal language use (amongst many others). For example, what a loose utterance of (1) communicates differs from what it literally expresses: (1) Lena arrived at 9 o'clock. Loose talk is interesting (or so I will argue). It has certain distinctive features which raise important questions about the connection between literal and non‐literal language use. This paper aims to (i.) (...) introduce a range of novel data demonstrating certain overlooked features of loose talk, and (ii.) develop a new theory of the phenomenon which accounts for these data. In particular, this theory is motivated by the need to explain minimal pairs such as (2)-(3): (2) Lena arrived at 9 o'clock, but she did not arrive at 9 o'clock exactly. (3) ?? Lena did not arrive at 9 o'clock exactly, but she arrived at 9 o'clock. (2) and (3) agree in their truth conditions. Yet they differ in felicity. As such, they constitute a problem for any account which hopes to predict the acceptability of the loose use of a sentence from its truth conditions and the context of utterance alone. Instead, it will be argued, to explain loose talk phenomena we must posit an additional layer of meaning outstripping truth conditions. This layer of meaning is shown to exhibit a range of properties, all of which point to its being semantically encoded. Thus, if correct, the theory provides a new example of how semantic meaning must extend beyond literal, truth‐conditional content. (shrink)

It has become recently popular to suggest that knowledge is the epistemic norm of practical reasoning and that this provides an important constraint on the correct account of knowledge, one which favours subject-sensitive invariantism over contextualism and classic invariantism. I argue that there are putative counterexamples to both directions of the knowledge norm. Even if the knowledge norm can be defended against these counterexamples, I argue that it is a delicate issue whether it is true, one which relies on fine (...) distinctions among a variety of relevant notions of propriety which our intuitions may reflect. These notions variously apply to the agent herself, her character traits, her beliefs, her reasoning and any resultant action. Given the delicacy of these issues, I argue that the knowledge norm is not a fixed point from which to defend substantive and controversial views in epistemology. Rather, these views need to be defended on other grounds. (shrink)

In recent work on the semantics of ‘knowledge’-attributions, a variety of accounts have been proposed that aim to explain the data about speaker intuitions in familiar cases such as DeRose’s Bank Case or Cohen’s Airport Case by means of pragmatic mechanisms, notably Gricean implicatures. This paper argues that pragmatic explanations of the data regarding ‘knowledge’-attributions are unsuccessful and concludes that in explaining those data we have to resort to accounts that (a) take those data at their semantic face value (Epistemic (...) Contextualism, Subject-Sensitive Invariantism or Epistemic Relativism), or (b) reject them on psychological grounds (Moderate Insensitive Invariantism). To establish this conclusion, the paper relies solely upon widely accepted assumptions about pragmatic theory, broadly construed, and on the Stalnakerian insight that linguistic communication takes place against the backdrop of a set of mutually accepted propositions: a conversation’s common ground. (shrink)

Abstract One of the most popular objections against epistemic contextualism is the so-called ?warranted assertability? objection. The objection is based on the possibility of a ?warranted assertability manoeuvre?, also known as a WAM. I argue here that WAMs are of very limited scope and importance. An important class of cases cannot be dealt with by WAMs. No analogue of WAMs is available for these cases. One should thus not take WAMs too seriously in the debate about epistemic contextualism.

Moderate pragmatic invariantism (MPI) is a proposal to explain why our intuitions about the truth-value of knowledge claims vary with stakes and salient error-possibilities. The basic idea is that this variation is due to a variation not in the propositions expressed (as epistemic contextualists would have it) but in the propositions conversationally implicated. I will argue that MPI is mistaken: I will distinguish two kinds of implicature, namely, additive and substitutional implicatures. I will then argue, first, that the proponent of (...) MPI cannot appeal to additive implicatures because they don’t affect truth-value intuitions in the required way. Second, I will argue that the proponent of MPI cannot appeal to substitutional implicatures either because, even though they may have the required effects on truth-value intuitions, they don’t feature in the relevant cases. It follows that MPI is mistaken because whether the proponent of MPI appeals to additive or substitutional implicatures, at least one of the claims that make up her view is false. Along the way, I will suggest principles about implicatures that should be relevant not only to MPI, but to pragmatic accounts of seemingly semantic intuitions in general. (shrink)

This book takes purism about knowledge as the default position and defends it from the challenges of pragmatic encroachment. The book is divided into two parts, a negative and a positive one. The negative part critically examines existing purist strategies in response to pragmatic encroachment. The positive part provides a new theory of how practical factors can systematically influence our confidence and explores some implications of such influence.

On the dominant contemporary accounts of how practical considerations affect what we ought to believe, practical considerations either encroach on epistemic rationality by affecting whether a belief is epistemically justified, or constitute distinctively practical reasons for belief which can only affect what we ought to believe by conflicting with epistemic rationality. This paper shows that a promising alternative view can be found in a surprising source: the writings of Søren Kierkegaard. I argue that in light of two of his central (...) epistemological commitments—belief-credence dualism and epistemic permissivism about outright belief—Kierkegaard holds that practical considerations can affect what we ought to believe without either encroaching on or (necessarily) conflicting with epistemic rationality. The central idea is that practical considerations can determine which among the epistemically permitted outright doxastic attitudes one should all-things-considered adopt. In addition to constituting a novel, systematic interpretation of Kierkegaard’s account of how practical considerations affect what we ought to believe, this suggests that Kierkegaard holds a distinctive and underexplored view that constitutes a serious philosophical rival to dominant contemporary views. (shrink)

This is the most comprehensive book ever published on philosophical methodology. A team of thirty-eight of the world's leading philosophers present original essays on various aspects of how philosophy should be and is done. The first part is devoted to broad traditions and approaches to philosophical methodology. The entries in the second part address topics in philosophical methodology, such as intuitions, conceptual analysis, and transcendental arguments. The third part of the book is devoted to essays about the interconnections between philosophy (...) and neighbouring fields, including those of mathematics, psychology, literature and film, and neuroscience. (shrink)

‘Know-that’, like so many natural language expressions, exhibits patterns of use that provide evidence for its context-sensitivity. A popular family of views – call it prag- matic invariantism – attempts to explain the shifty patterns by appeal to a pragmatic thesis: while the semantic meaning of ‘know-that’ is stable across all contexts of use, sentences of the form ‘S knows [doesn’t know] that p’ can be used to communicate a pragmatic content that depends on the context of use. In this (...) paper, the author argues that pragmatic invariantism makes inaccurate predictions for a wide range of well- known use data and is committed to attributing systematic pragmatic error to ordinary speakers. But pragmatic error is unprecedented, and it is doubtful that speakers are systematically wrong about what they intend to communicate. (shrink)

In this paper I focus on a recently discussed phenomenon illustrated by sentences containing predicates of taste: the phenomenon of " perspectival plurality " , whereby sentences containing two or more predicates of taste have readings according to which each predicate pertains to a different perspective. This phenomenon has been shown to be problematic for (at least certain versions of) relativism. My main aim is to further the discussion by showing that the phenomenon extends to other perspectival expressions than predicates (...) of taste and by proposing a general solution to the problem raised by it on behalf of the relativist. The core claim of the solution (" multiple indexing ") is that utterances of sentences containing perspectival expressions should be evaluated with respect to (possibly infinite) sequences of perspective parameters. (shrink)

In this paper, I explain the curious role played by the Argument from Absolute Terms in Peter Unger's book Ignorance, I provide a critical presentation of the argument, and I consider some outstanding issues and the argument’s contemporary significance.

In this chapter, we follow Edward Craig?s advice: ask what the concept of knowledge does for us and use our findings as clues about its application conditions. What a concept does for us is a matter of what we can do with it, and what we do with concepts is deploy them in thought and language. So, we will examine the purposes we have in attributing knowledge. This chapter examines two such purposes, agent evaluation and informant-suggestion, and brings the results (...) to bear on an important debate about the application conditions of the concept of knowledge?the debate between contextualists and their rivals. (shrink)

John MacFarlane explores how we might make sense of the idea that truth is relative. He provides new, satisfying accounts of parts of our thought and talk that have resisted traditional methods of analysis, including what we mean when we talk about what is tasty, what we know, what will happen, what might be the case, and what we ought to do.

Epistemic contextualism, many critics argue, entails that ordinary speakers are blind to the fact that knowledge claims have context-sensitive truth conditions. This attribution of blindness, critics add, seriously undermines contextualism. I show that this criticism and, in general, discussions about the error theory entailed by contextualism, greatly underestimates the complexity and diversity of the data about ordinary speakers? inter-contextual judgments, as well as the range of explanatory moves that are open to both invariantists and contextualists concerning such judgments. Contextualism does (...) entail that some speakers suffer from semantic blindness; however, at its roots, this blindness concerns not the context-sensitivity of knowledge claims, but the question whether knowledge sentences possess context-independent truth conditions. I argue that this blindness should not be deemed problematic, but that invariantism entails an error theory that is, by comparison, much more troubling. (shrink)

The present volume contains a collection of papers presented at the 21st annual meeting “Sinn und Bedeutung” of the Gesellschaft fur Semantik, which was held at the University of Edinburgh on September 4th–6th, 2016. The Sinn und Bedeutung conferences are one of the leading international venues for research in formal semantics.

A certain number of cases suggest that our willingness to ascribe “knowledge” can be influenced by practical factors. For revisionary proposals, they indicate that the truth‐values of “knowledge” ascriptions vary with practical factors. For conservative proposals, on the contrary, nothing surprising is happening. Standard pragmatic approaches appeal to pragmatic implicatures and psychological approaches to the idea that belief formation is influenced by practical factors. Conservative proposals have not yet offered a fully satisfactory explanation, though. In this article, I introduce and (...) defend a third conservative proposal which I call “Refined Invariantism”. The two main claims of this proposal are that (1) we should distinguish between high stakes cases in which the subject does not believe (that he knows) the target proposition and those in which he believes (that he knows) the target proposition and that (2) we should adopt a psychological treatment for the first kind of case and a pragmatic treatment based on the epistemic standards for appropriate assertion and action for the second kind of case. I argue that this new combined approach avoids the main pitfalls of its two conservative rivals and that it gives new life to the generality objection levelled against revisionary views. (shrink)

According to a widely discussed view, knowledge plays a significant normative role in action: It is epistemically rational to treat p as your reason for action if and only if you know that p. As many philosophers have observed, however, this view clashes with the claim that knowledge is moderate and stable. For, granting that claim, there will be high stakes cases in which knowledge seems insufficient. To deal with such cases, some philosophers embracing the knowledge norm combine three independently (...) plausible claims. First, they say that no non-trivial condition is luminous; second, they say that doing something while not being in a position to know that that is appropriate is bad (in high stakes cases); third, they say that in the high stakes cases in question, the subject knows but fails to be in a position to know that she knows (Williamson Philos Q 55:213–235, 2005). This paper argues that this account can overcome the main objections already raised in the literature, but that it still faces the apparently insurmountable challenge of providing a natural and helpful way of substantiating the second claim. (shrink)

Many recent definitions of lying are based on the notion of what is said. This paper argues that says-based definitions of lying cannot account for lies involving non-literal speech, such as metaphor, hyperbole, loose use or irony. It proposes that lies should instead be defined in terms of assertion, where what is asserted need not coincide with what is said. And it points to possible implications this outcome might have for the ethics of lying.

Positions in the debate about the correct semantics of “S knows that p” are sometimes motivated in part by an appeal to interpretive charity. In particular, non-skeptical views hold that many utterances of the sentence “S knows that p” are true and some of them think the fact that their views are able to respect this is a reason why their views are more charitable than skeptical invariantism. However, little attention has been paid to why charity should be understood in (...) this way and little effort has been spent justifying the notion that a charitable semantics is likely to be true. I distinguish two kinds of interpretive charity. One principle of charity is often appealed to in the literature. I introduce a second. I argue that while some positions better respect one principle of charity, the reverse is true of the other principle of charity. I conclude with some remarks about how to break this apparent tie. (shrink)

The ambiguity theory of “knows” is the view that knows and its cognates have more than one propositional sense—i.e., more than one sense that can properly be used in “knows that” etc. constructions. The ambiguity theory of “know” has received relatively little attention as an account of the truth-conditions for knowledge ascriptions and denials—especially compared to views like classical, moderate invariantism and epistemic contextualism. In this paper, it is argued that the ambiguity theory of knows has an advantage over both (...) classical, moderate invariantism and epistemic contextualism. This advantage is that it is the only one of these views that can account for “diverging knowledge responses without inconsistency” —i.e., cases in which, for the same subject S and proposition p, one and the same speaker says truly “S knows p” but instead could have truly said “S does not know p” and vice versa. This paper argues both for the existence of DRWI scenarios and the ability of the ambiguity theory of knows to best explain their existence. (shrink)

Collocations are recurrent combinations of words where one lexical item occurs near another lexical item with a frequency far greater than chance. Collocations can be used to study meaning. I argue that the collocational phrase ‘really know’, in conjunction with some reasonable interpretive conclusions, provides us with evidence that the verb ‘know’ has an infallibilist sense. I make my case, first, by arguing that ‘really’ when part of the phrase ‘really know’ is best understood as synonymous with ‘truly’. I then (...) argue that there are two plausible interpretations of the function that ‘really’ plays in the phrase ‘really know’. On the first interpretation, ‘really’ helps distinguish claims about genuine infallibilist knowing from loose talk about ‘knowing’. On the second interpretation, ‘really’ is often used to disambiguate an infallibilist sense of ‘know’ from a fallibilist sense of ‘know’. On either interpretation, there is an infallibilist sense of ‘know’. (shrink)

The ambiguity theory of ‘knows’ is the view that ‘knows’ and its cognates have more than one propositional sense – i.e. more than one sense that can properly be used in ‘knows that’ etc. constructions. Given that most of us are ‘intuitive invariantists’ – i.e. most of us initially have the intuition that ‘knows’ is univocal – defenders of the ambiguity theory need to offer an explanation for the semantic blindness present if ‘knows’ is in fact ambiguous. This paper is (...) an attempt to offer such an explanation. Section 1 contains a general argument for the ubiquity of semantic blindness for ambiguous words; the upshot being that semantic blindness for the ambiguity of ‘knows’ is thus unsurprising. Section 2 offers more specific arguments for why ‘knows’ is the type of ambiguous word that we’re very unlikely to quickly recognize is ambiguous. (shrink)

In his book Knowledge and Practical Interests Jason Stanley offers an argument for the conclusion that it is quite unlikely that an ambiguity theory of ‘knows’ can be “linguistically grounded”. His argument rests on two important assumptions: that linguistic grounding of ambiguity requires evidence of the purported different senses of a word being represented by different words in other languages and that such evidence is lacking in the case of ‘knows’. In this paper, I challenge the conclusion that there isn’t (...) a linguistic grounding for an ambiguity theory of ‘knows’ by making cases against both of Stanley’s major assumptions. I will do this by making a case for a prime facie linguistic grounding for a polysemy theory of ‘knows’ without appealing to word use in other languages. Given that a polysemy theory of ‘knows’ is a type of ambiguity theory of ‘knows’, if I succeed in linguistically grounding a polysemy theory of ‘knows’, then I have shown that at least one type of ambiguity theory of ‘knows’ can be linguistically grounded. (shrink)

Contextualists and pragmatists agree that knowledge-denying sentences are contextually variable, in the sense that a knowledge-denying sentence might semantically express a false proposition in one context and a true proposition in another context, without any change in the properties traditionally viewed as necessary for knowledge. Minimalists deny both pragmatism and contextualism, and maintain that knowledge-denying sentences are not contextually variable. To defend their view from cases like DeRose and Stanley's high stakes bank case, minimalists like Patrick Rysiew, Jessica Brown, and (...) Wayne Davis forward ‘warranted assertability maneuvers.’ The basic idea is that some knowledge-denying sentence seems contextually variable because we mistake what a speaker pragmatically conveys by uttering that sentence for what she literally says by uttering that sentence. In this paper, I raise problems for the warranted assertability maneuvers of Rysiew, Brown, and Davis, and then present a warranted assertability maneuver that should succeed if any warranted assertability maneuver will succeed. I then show how my warranted assertability maneuver fails, and how the problem with my warranted assertability maneuver generalizes to pragmatic responses in general. The upshot of my argument is that, in order to defend their view from cases like DeRose and Stanley's high stakes bank case, minimalists must prioritize the epistemological question whether the subjects in those cases know over linguistic questions about the pragmatics of various knowledge-denying sentences. (shrink)

Intellectualists disagree with anti-intellectualists about the relationship between knowledge and truth. According to intellectualists, this relationship is intimate. Knowledge entails true belief, and in fact everything required for knowledge is somehow relevant to the probability that the belief in question is true. According to anti-intellectualists, this relationship isn’t intimate. Or, at least, it’s not as intimate as intellectualists think. Factors that aren’t in any way relevant to the probability that a belief is true can make a difference to whether it (...) counts as knowledge. In this paper, I give a new argument for anti-intellectualism and draw out consequences of this argument for the pragmatic encroachment debate. The standard purist objection to pragmatism is that pragmatism entails anti-intellectualism. As I show, anti-intellectualism follows from premises that are plausible even if purism is true, so the standard purist objection to pragmatism fails. (shrink)

Contextualism in epistemology has traditionally been understood as the view that “know” functions semantically like an indexical term, encoding different contents in contexts with different epistemic standards. But the indexical hypothesis about “know” faces a range of objections. This article explores an alternative version of contextualism on which “know” is a semantically stable term, and the truth-conditional variability in knowledge claims is a matter of pragmatic enrichment. The central idea is that in contexts with stringent epistemic standards, knowledge claims are (...) narrowed: “know” is used in such contexts to make assertions about particularly demanding types of knowledge. The resulting picture captures all of the intuitive data that motivate contextualism while sidestepping the controversial linguistic thesis at its heart. After developing the view, the article shows in detail how it avoids one influential linguistic objection to traditional contextualism concerning indirect speech reports, and then answers an objection concerning the unavailability of certain types of clarification speeches. (shrink)

A necessary criterion of Duncan Pritchard’s Anti-luck Virtue Epistemology is his safety condition. A believer cannot know p unless her belief is safe. Her belief is safe only if p could not have easily been false. But “easily” is not to be understood probabilistically. The chance that p is false might be extremely low and yet p remains unsafe. This is what happens, Pritchard argues, in lottery examples and explains why knowledge is not a function of the probabilistic strength of (...) one’s evidence. This paper argues that, contra Pritchard, modality holds no epistemic advantage over this type of “probabilistic evidentialism” that he criticizes. I begin with a review of Pritchard’s argument supporting modality over probability; second, I explain the problems with this argument, and third, I offer an alternative explanation of the lottery example. At the completion of the paper, modality and probability are on equal epistemic footing. (shrink)

According to a view widely held by epistemic contextualists, the truth conditions of a knowledge claim depend on features of the context such as the presuppositions, interests and purposes of the conversational participants. Against this view, I defend an intentionalist account, according to which the truth conditions of a knowledge attribution are determined by the speaker’s intention. I show that an intentionalist version of contextualism has several advantages over its more widely accepted rival account.

Any good theory of knowledge ascriptions should explain and predict our judgments about their felicity. I argue that any such explanation must take into account a distinction between three ways of using knowledge ascriptions: to suggest acceptance of the embedded proposition, to explain or predict a subject's behavior or attitudes, or to understand the relation of knowledge as such. The contextual effects on our judgments about felicity systematically differ between these three types of uses. Using such a distinction is, in (...) principle, open to both contextualist and pragmatic invariantist accounts of knowledge ascriptions. However, there are some implications pertaining to the use of the “method of cases” in the debate about knowledge ascriptions. (shrink)

Keith DeRose and Stewart Cohen object to the fallibilist strand of pragmatic invariantism regarding knowledge ascriptions that it is committed to non-cancelable pragmatic implications. I show that this objection points us to an asymmetry about which aspects of the conveyed content of knowledge ascriptions can be canceled: we can cancel those aspects that ascribe a lesser epistemic standing to the subject but not those that ascribe a better or perfect epistemic standing. This situation supports the infallibilist strand of pragmatic invariantism (...) according to which knowledge semantically requires absolute certainty but this claim is often pragmatically weakened: it turns out that exactly those aspects of the conveyed content are cancelable that this view claims are pragmatic. I also argue that attributor contextualism and relativism do not have an alternative explanation of this phenomenon. (shrink)

Analytic Philosophy, Volume 63, Issue 1, Page 16-27, March 2022.

AbstarctIn the first installment of Varieties of Skeptical Invariantism, we set the scene for subsequent discussion with Unger's (1975) modern classic of global skepticism and distinguished three varieties of skeptical invariantism in recent literature: traditional skeptical invariantism, fallibilist science-based skepticism and practical skepticism. We then presented fallibilist science-based skepticism, that is, the position that relaxes the stringency of the standard of knowledge but still questions parts of our everyday knowledge on the basis of scientific reasons. In particular, we presented Frances’ (...) (2005) ‘live’ skepticism and Hannon's (forthcoming) ‘hard-hitting’ skepticism. In this second installment, we present the two other varieties of skeptical invariantism we identified: traditional skepticism (high-standard and infallibilist) that respects all three commitments (intellectualism, invariantism, stringency) and practical skepticism that questions the intellectualist commitment. (shrink)

I develop one partial explanation of the origins of our fallibilist intuitions about knowledge in ordinary language fallibilism and argue that this explanation indicates that our epistemic methodology should be more impartial and theory-neutral. First, I explain why the so-called Moorean constraint (cf. Hawthorne 2005, 111) that encapsulates fallibilist intuitions is fallibilism’s cornerstone. Second, I describe a pattern of fallibilist reasoning in light of the influential dual processing and heuristics and biases approach to cognition (cf. Kahneman 2011; Thaler and Sunstein (...) 2008; Evans 2017). I suggest that this pattern of reasoning involves the question-substitution heuristic, the availability and representativeness heuristics, the focusing bias as well as framing effects, priming and the anchoring and adjusting heuristic. Third, I argue that this fallibilist pattern of reasoning is methodologically dubious because it involves a vicious circularity and briefly outline an alternative, more impartial and theory-neutral abductive methodology for the theory of knowledge. Finally, I briefly explain how this analysis sheds light on the ordinary language fallibilism of Moore (1939), Austin (1961), Wittgenstein (1969) and Chisholm (1982). (shrink)

Skeptical invariantism does not account for the intuitive connections between knowledge, assertion, and practical reasoning and this constitutes a significant problem for the position because it does not save corresponding epistemic appearances (cf. Hawthorne (2004:131-5)). Moreover, it is an attraction of fallibilist over infallibilist-skeptical views that they can easily account for the epistemic appearances about the connections between knowledge, assertion, and practical reasoning (cf. Williamson (2000:249-255)). Call this argument ‘the argument from the knowledge norm’. I motivate and develop a Humean, (...) pragmatist strategy for a skeptical response to ‘the argument from the knowledge norm’. Afterwards I outline a ‘toy’ version of pragmatic skepticism that can implement the strategy and save our everyday practice of assertion and practical reasoning. To this effect, I distinguish between assertibility conditions and truth conditions for ‘know’ and suggest that while assertibility conditions are pragmatic conditions sensitive to practical exigencies, truth conditions are semantic conditions sensitive only to truth. I briefly respond to three objections and conclude that pragmatic skepticism is resourceful enough to save our everyday practice of (fallibilist) assertion and practical reasoning and, hence, pay some due respect to corresponding epistemic appearances. (shrink)

That knowledge ascriptions exhibit some form of sensitivity to context is uncontroversial. How best to account for the context-sensitivity at issue, however, is the topic of heated debates. A certain version of nonindexical contextualism seems to be a promising option. Even so, it is incumbent upon any contextualist account to explain in what way and to what extent the epistemic standard operative in a particular context of epistemic evaluation is affected by non-epistemic factors. In this paper, I investigate how non-epistemic (...) factors come into play when knowledge is ascribed. I argue that knowledge ascriptions often serve the purpose of providing actionable information. This, in turn, requires that epistemic interests be balanced against non-epistemic interests. Moreover, it raises the question of whose interests matter, those of the ascriber, the addressee, or the subject of ascription. Eventually, an answer to the question is suggested. (shrink)

My aim in the paper will be to better understand what faultless disagreement could possibly consist in and what speakers disagree over when they faultlessly do so. To that end, I will first look at various examples of faultless disagreement. Since I will eventually claim that different forms of faultless disagreement can be modeled semantically on different forms of context-sensitivity I will, in a second step, discuss three different semantic accounts that all promise to successfully accommodate certain forms of context-sensitivity: (...) Indexical Contextualism, Nonindexcal Contextualism and Radical Relativism . Focussing on the controversy between Indexical and Nonindexical Contextualists the remainder of the paper will be devoted to the question which theory is best suited to handle what kind of disagreement. (shrink)

How should we account for the contextual variability of knowledge claims? Many philosophers favour an invariantist account on which such contextual variability is due entirely to pragmatic factors, leaving no interesting context-sensitivity in the semantic meaning of ‘know that.’ I reject this invariantist division of labor by arguing that pragmatic invariantists have no principled account of embedded occurrences of ‘S knows/doesn’t know that p’: Occurrences embedded within larger linguistic constructions such as conditional sentences, attitude verbs, expressions of probability, comparatives, and (...) many others, I argue, give rise to a threefold problem of embedded implicatures. (shrink)