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Interests Contextualism

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Abstract

In this paper I develop a version of contextualism that I call interests contextualism. Interests contextualism is the view that the truth-conditions of knowledge ascribing and denying sentences are partly determined by the ascriber’s interests and purposes. It therefore stands in opposition to the usual view on which the truth-conditions are partly determined by the ascriber’s conversational context. I give an argument against one particular implementation of the usual view, differentiate interests contextualism from other prominent versions of contextualism and argue that, unlike those versions, interests contextualism can mitigate against the epistemic descent objection put forward by Duncan Pritchard in his ‘Contextualism, Scepticism, and the Problem of Epistemic Descent’ (the objection is that, on the contextualist view, an ascriber of knowledge cannot, for some subject S and proposition p, properly ascribe knowledge that p to S if that ascriber has previously retracted an earlier ascription of knowledge that p to S).

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Notes

  1. In this paper I follow the practice of put quotation marks around ‘know’ and its cognates to indicate semantic ascent.

  2. See Lewis 1996 and Blome-Tillmann 2009 for two other versions of RAC in the literature.

  3. I take this case from DeRose (see DeRose 2009, Chapter 1).

  4. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for Philosophia for pressing me to clarify both points.

  5. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for Philosophia for pressing me on the need to clarify both what I have to say about the range of cases that one can consider and what bearing these cases have on the argument I’m developing in this paper.

  6. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for Philosophia for pointing out that Blome-Tillmann holds that the truth-value of an assertion in these sorts of contexts is unclear rather than, as I had claimed in an earlier version of this paper, false.

  7. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for Philosophia for pressing this objection.

  8. I discuss both objections in a review of DeRose’s The Case for Contextualism that’s forthcoming in the Philosophical Review, co-authored with Duncan Pritchard. In this paper I expand upon both objections.

  9. This gives us another way of stating the second objection to DeRose’s gap-view in the previous section. The argument I developed shows that, on DeRose’s gap view, epistemic descent isn’t even possible. I will not pursue this given that Pritchard’s objection is targeted at contextualism generally, as opposed to DeRose’s version of it.

  10. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for Philosophia for urging me to clarify Pritchard’s objection.

References

  • Blome-Tillmann, M. (2009). Knowledge and Presuppositions. Mind, 118(470), 241–294.

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  • DeRose, K. (1995). Solving the skeptical problem. Philosophical Review, 104(1), 1–52.

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  • DeRose, K. (2009). The case for contextualism. Oxford: Clarendon.

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  • Lewis, D. (1996). Elusive knowledge. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 74, 649–667.

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  • Pritchard, D. (2001). 'Contextualism. Scepticism, and the Problem of Epistemic Descent'. Dialectica, 55, 327–349.

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  • Stanley, J. (2005). Knowledge and practical interests. Oxford: OUP.

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  • Williams, B. (1980). ‘Internal and External Reasons’, reprinted with postscript in Millgram, ed., 2001, Varieties of Practical Reasoning, MIT Press, pp. 77–97.

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Acknowledgement

I would like to thank Jessica Brown for supervising the MLitt dissertation that this paper grew out of. Thanks also to Allan Hazlett, Duncan Pritchard and audiences at the Edinburgh University postgraduate work in progress seminar and the St Andrews University MLitt dissertation workshop for valuable feedback and discussion on various versions of this paper. Finally, thanks to an anonymous reviewer for Philosophia for extensive comments on an earlier version of the paper.

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  1. School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK

    Robin McKenna

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  1. Robin McKenna
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Correspondence to Robin McKenna.

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McKenna, R. Interests Contextualism. Philosophia 39, 741–750 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-011-9316-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-011-9316-7

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