First published in 1987. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

I present the features of the ordinary use of 'knows' that make a compelling case for the contextualist account of that verb, and I outline and defend the methodology that takes us from the data to a contextualist conclusion. Along the way, the superiority of contextualism over subject-sensitive invariantism is defended, and, in the final section, I answer some objections to contextualism.

What happens to the "conversational score" when speakers in a conversation push the score for a context-sensitive term in different directions? In epistemology, contextualists are often construed as holding that both the skeptic ("You don't know!") and her opponent ("Oh, yes I do!") speak truthfully when they debate. This assumes a "multiple scoreboards" version of contextualism. But contextualists themselves typically opt for "single scoreboard" views on which such apparently competing claims really do conflict. This paper explores several single scoreboard options (...) for contextualists, opting in the end for the "gap view," on which neither of our debaters speaks truthfully. (shrink)

This paper uses the knowledge account of assertion (KAA) in defense of epistemological contextualism. Part 1 explores the main problem afflicting contextualism, what I call the "Generality Objection." Part 2 presents and defends both KAA and a powerful new positive argument that it provides for contextualism. Part 3 uses KAA to answer the Generality Objection, and also casts other shadows over the prospects for anti-contextualism.

This paper brings together two positions that for the most part have been developed and defended independently of one another: contextualism about knowledge attributions and the knowledge account of assertion.

In “On Sense and Reference,” surrounding his discussion of how we describe what people say and think, identity is Frege’s first stop and his last. We will follow Frege’s plan here, but we will stop also in the land of make-believe.

This reissue of an American philosophical classic includes a new preface by Cavell, in which he discusses the work's reception and influence. The work fosters a fascinating relationship between philosophy and literature both by augmenting his philosophical discussions with examples from literature and by applying philosophical theories to literary texts. Cavell also succeeds in drawing some very important parallels between the British analytic tradition and the continental tradition, by comparing skepticism as understood in Descartes, Hume, and Kant with philosophy of (...) language as practiced by Wittgenstein and Austin. (shrink)

"This stunning work is without question a major contribution to Cartesian studies, to the field of early modern philosophy, and to general epistemology--original, provocative, and philosophically interesting.

David Lewis (1941-2001) was Class of 1943 University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. His contributions spanned philosophical logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, metaphysics, and epistemology. In On the Plurality of Worlds, he defended his challenging metaphysical position, "modal realism." He was also the author of the books Convention, Counterfactuals, Parts of Classes, and several volumes of collected papers.

Jason Stanley presents a startling and provocative claim about knowledge: that whether or not someone knows a proposition at a given time is in part determined by his or her practical interests, i.e. by how much is at stake for that person at that time. In defending this thesis, Stanley introduces readers to a number of strategies for resolving philosophical paradox, making the book essential not just for specialists in epistemology but for all philosophers interested in philosophical methodology. Since a (...) number of his strategies appeal to linguistic evidence, it will be of great interest to linguists as well. (shrink)

How should one understand knowledge-wh ascriptions? That is, how should one understand claims such as ‘‘I know where the car is parked,’’ which feature an interrogative complement? The received view is that knowledge-wh reduces to knowledge that p, where p happens to be the answer to the question Q denoted by the wh-clause. I will argue that knowledge-wh includes the question—to know-wh is to know that p, as the answer to Q. I will then argue that knowledge-that includes a contextually (...) implicit question. I will conclude that knowledge is a question-relative state. Knowing is knowing the answer, and whether one knows the answer depends (in part) on the question. (shrink)

David Hume's Enquiry concerning Human Understanding is the definitive statement of the greatest philosopher in the English language. His arguments in support of reasoning from experience, and against the "sophistry and illusion"of religiously inspired philosophical fantasies, caused controversy in the eighteenth century and are strikingly relevant today, when faith and science continue to clash. The Enquiry considers the origin and processes of human thought, reaching the stark conclusion that we can have no ultimate understanding of the physical world, or indeed (...) our own minds. In either sphere we must depend on instinctive learning from experience, recognizing our animal nature and the limits of reason. Hume's calm and open-minded skepticism thus aims to provide a new basis for science, liberating us from the "superstition" of false metaphysics and religion. His Enquiry remains one of the best introductions to the study of philosophy, and his edition places it in its historical and philosophical context. (shrink)

Does G. E. Moore know that he has hands? Yes, says the dogmatist: Moore’s hands are right before his eyes. No, says the skeptic: for all Moore knows he could be a brain-in-a-vat. Yes and no, says the contrastivist: yes, Moore knows that he has hands rather than stumps; but no, Moore does not know that he has hands rather than vat-images of hands. The dogmatist and the skeptic suppose that knowledge is a binary, categorical relation: s knows that p. (...) The contrastivist says that knowledge is a ternary, contrastive relation: s knows that p rather than q. (shrink)

Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in the semantics of knowledge-attributing sentences, not just among epistemologists but among philosophers of language seeking a general understanding of linguistic context sensitivity. Despite all this critical attention, however, we are as far from consensus as ever. If we have learned anything, it is that each of the standard views—invariantism, contextualism, and sensitive invariantism—has its Achilles’ heel: a residuum of facts about our use of knowledge attributions that it can explain only with (...) special pleading. This is not surprising if, as I will argue, there is a grain of truth in each of these views. (shrink)

"I had read the book before in the shorter Harper Torchbook edition but read it again right through--and found it as interesting and exciting as before. I regard it as one of the seminal books in the history of ideas. Based on a prodigious amount of original research, it demonstrated conclusively and in fascinating details how the transmission of ancient skepticism was a bital factor in the formation of modern thought. The story is rich in implications for th history of (...) philosophy, the history of science, and the history of religious thought. Popkin's work has already inspired further work by others--and the new edition takes account of this, most importantly the work of Charles Schmitt. The two new chapters extend the story as far as Spinoza, with special reference to the beginnings of biblical criticism.... Popkin's history is of great potential interest to a wide readership--wider than most specialist publications and wider than it has (so far as I can tell) reached hitherto."--M.F. Burnyeat, Professor of Philosophy, University College London. (shrink)

In these challenging pages, Unger argues for the extreme skeptical view that, not only can nothing ever be known, but no one can ever have any reason at all for anything. A consequence of this is that we cannot ever have any emotions about anything: no one can ever be happy or sad about anything. Finally, in this reduction to absurdity of virtually all our supposed thought, he argues that no one can ever believe, or even say, that anything is (...) the case. (shrink)

Stephen Schiffer; XIII*—Contextualist Solutions to Scepticism, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 96, Issue 1, 1 June 1996, Pages 317–334, https://.

The skeptic says that “knowledge” is an absolute term, whereas the contextualist says that ‘knowledge” is a relationally absolute term. Which is the better hypothesis about “knowledge”? And what implications do these hypotheses about “knowledge” have for knowledge? I argue that the skeptic has the better hypothesis about “knowledge”, but that both hypotheses about “knowledge” have deeply anti‐skeptical implications for knowledge, since both presuppose our capacity for epistemically salient discrimination.

In his justifiedly famous paper, “Elusive Knowledge” (Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 74:4, 1996), David Lewis presents a contextualist account of knowledge, which, like other contextualist accounts, depicts sceptical claims as involving application of a higher standard of knowledge than is applied in everyday ascriptions of knowledge. On Lewis’ account, the sceptic’s denials and the everyday ascriptions are made in different contexts, which allows them both to be true. His account gives detailed specification of how contexts are to be determined. My (...) paper points out that this view is unattractive to the sceptic, since it makes scepticism, even if true, completely disconnected from and irrelevant to the rest of our cognitive discourse. After arguing that the sceptic’s own ascriptions of knowledge (made outside the philosophy seminar room) can be explained in non-contextualist ways, I expound and criticise Lewis’ analysis of knowledge, taking up in particular a central component of his account, the “Rule of Attention”. In the central part of the paper I argue that the reasons given for the inclusion of the rule are all inadequate, and also that there are positive reasons for rejecting it. The final section of the paper argues that the excision of the Rule of Attention removed would leave Lewis’ account subject to serious counter- examples. (shrink)

A skeptic will from time to time make such claims as ‘We know nothing.’ Call this the skeptical use of the word ‘know.’ In apparent contradiction of the skeptic's claims, almost all of us firmly ascribe knowledge to ourselves and others. We use the word ‘know’ and its cognates frequently and fluently in largely untroubled communication with our fellows. We make judgments ascribing knowledge to ourselves and others. Furthermore, faced with the same situation and needing to make a judgment about (...) whether to ascribe knowledge or not, we agree on the whole with each other's ascriptions. For the sake of a term, and being careful to neglect any stray connotations it may carry, let us call this the cognitivist use of ‘know.’. (shrink)

Philosophers on all sides of the contextualism debates have had an overly narrow conception of what semantic context sensitivity could be. They have conflated context sensitivity (dependence of truth or extension on features of context) with indexicality (dependence of content on features of context). As a result of this conflation, proponents of contextualism have taken arguments that establish only context sensitivity to establish indexicality, while opponents of contextualism have taken arguments against indexicality to be arguments against context sensitivity. Once these (...) concepts are carefully pulled apart, it becomes clear that there is conceptual space in semantic theory for nonindexical forms of contextualism that have many advantages over the usual indexical forms. (shrink)

According to contextualist accounts, the truth value of a given knowledge ascription may vary with features of the ascriber's context. As a result, the following may be true: "X doesn't know that P but Y says something true in asserting 'X knows that P'". The contextualist must defend his theory in the light of this unpleasant but inevitable consequence. The best way of doing this is to construe the context sensitivity of knowledge ascriptions not as deriving from an alleged indexicality (...) of the word "know" nor from its vagueness or ambiguity, but rather from a distinct semantic feature of the word "know", namely its unspecificity. (shrink)

Knowledge and Lotteries is organized around an epistemological puzzle: in many cases, we seem consistently inclined to deny that we know a certain class of propositions, while crediting ourselves with knowledge of propositions that imply them. In its starkest form, the puzzle is this: we do not think we know that a given lottery ticket will be a loser, yet we normally count ourselves as knowing all sorts of ordinary things that entail that its holder will not suddenly acquire a (...) large fortune. After providing a number of specific and general characterizations of the puzzle, Hawthorne carefully examines the competing merits of candidate solutions. In so doing, he explores a number of central questions concerning the nature and importance of knowledge, including the relationship of knowledge to assertion and practical reasoning, the status of epistemic closure principles, the merits of various brands of scepticism, the prospects for a contextualist account of knowledge, and the potential for other sorts of salience-sensitive accounts. Along the way, he offers a careful treatment of pertinent issues at the foundations of semantics. His book will be of interest to anyone working in the field of epistemology, as well as to philosophers of language. (shrink)

I argue that the truth of knowledge claims is relative to what I shall call 'standards of caution'--so that a person with a given body of evidence might know a proposition relative to a relaxed standard of caution but not know the same proposition relative to a more rigorous one--and also that standards of caution themselves vary depending on a host of pragmatic considerations. I do not, of course, expect this thesis to sound natural at the beginning. However, I hope (...) to show that it is true and also that its truth is of consequence for epistemology. (shrink)

Volumes I and II provided a completely new translation of the philosophical works of Descartes, based on the best available Latin and French texts. Volume III contains 207 of Descartes' letters, over half of which have previously not been translated into English. It incorporates, in its entirety, Anthony Kenny's celebrated translation of selected philosophical letters, first published in 1970. In conjunction with Volumes I and II it is designed to meet the widespread demand for a comprehensive, authoritative and accurate edition (...) of Descartes' philosophical writings in clear and readable modern English. (shrink)

Martin Heidegger’s 1942 lecture course interprets Friedrich Hölderlin’s hymn "The Ister" within the context of Hölderlin’s poetic and philosophical work, with particular emphasis on Hölderlin’s dialogue with Greek tragedy.

These five essays began a debate about the nature and scope of ancient scepticism which has transformed our understanding of what scepticism originally was. Together they provide a vigorous and highly stimulating introduction to the thought of the original sceptics, and shed new light on its relation to sceptical arguments in modern philosophy.

"This stunning work is without question a major contribution to Cartesian studies, to the field of early modern philosophy, and to general epistemology- ...