Assertion, Action, and Context (original) (raw)
Related papers
Contextualism and Knowledge Norms
The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Contextualism, 2017
I provide an opinionated overview of the literature on the relationship of contextualism to knowledge norms for action, assertion, and belief. I point out that contextualists about ‘knows’ are precluded from accepting the simplest versions of knowledge norms; they must, if they are to accept knowledge norms at all, accept “relativized” versions of them. I survey arguments from knowledge norms both for and against contextualism, tentatively concluding that commitment to knowledge norms does not conclusively win the day either for contextualism or for its rivals. But I also suggest that an antecedent commitment to contextualism about normative terms may provide grounds for suspicion about knowledge norms, and a debunking explanation of some of the data offered in favor of such norms.
Contextualism and the Knowledge Norms
2013
Epistemic contextualism is widely believed to be incompatible with the recently popular view that knowledge is the norm of assertion, practical reasoning, or belief. I argue in this article that the problems arising for contextualism from the mentioned normative views are only apparent and can be resolved by acknowledging the fairly widespread phenomenon of non-obvious context-sensitivity (recently embraced by even some of contextualism's most ardent former critics). Building on recent insights about non-obvious context-sensitivity, the article outlines an independently attractive contextualist account of the mentioned epistemic norms and provides a solution to the puzzles they give rise to in a contextualist framework.
Epistemological Contextualism and the Knowledge Account of Assertion
Philosophia, 2009
In this paper, I take up an argument advanced by Keith DeRose (Philosophical Review, 111:167-203, 2002) that suggests that the knowledge account of assertion provides the basis of an argument in favor of contextualism. I discuss the knowledge account as the conjunction of two theses-a thesis claiming that knowledge is sufficient to license assertion KA and one claiming that knowledge is necessary to license assertion AK. Adducing evidence from Stalnaker's account of assertion, from conversational practice, and from arguments often raised in favor of the knowledge account, I suggest that neither the AK nor the KA theses are plausible. That is, I argue that the knowledge account of assertion to which DeRose appeals is in fact not suitable as an account of assertion. Given that DeRose's argument stands and falls with the knowledge account, I claim that the argument therefore fails.
Truth-Relativism, Norm-Relativism, and Assertion
The main goal in this paper is to outline and defend a form of Relativism, under which truth is absolute but assertibility is not. I dub such a view Norm-Relativism in contrast to the more familiar forms of Truth-Relativism. The key feature of this view is that just what norm of assertion, belief, and action is in play in some context is itself relative to a perspective. In slogan form: there is no fixed, single norm for assertion, belief, and action. Upshot: 'knows' is neither context-sensitive nor perspectival.
Relativism, Knowledge and Understanding
The arguments for and against a truth-relativist semantics for propositional knowledge attributions (KTR) have been debated almost exclusively in the philosophy of language. But what implications would this semantic thesis have in epistemology? This question has been largely unexplored. The aim of this paper is to establish and critique severalramifications of KTR in mainstream epistemology. The firstsection of the paperdevelops, over a series of arguments, the claim that MacFarlane’s (2005; 2010) core argument for KTR ultimately motivates(for better or worse) the extension of a truth-relativist semantics to a subset of understanding attributions—attributions of understanding-why. I conclude by presenting some reasons to think that even if KTR were otherwise plausible, a truth-relativist semantics for understanding-why attributions is not. These claims, taken together, constitute a kind of epistemological argument against MacFarlane-style truth-relativism for knowledge attributions.
Relativism, contextualism, expressivism, and the relativist stance
IV Postgraduate Conference of the SLMFCE, 2019
According to relativism, some propositions are true or false only with respect to a context of assessment. Traditional arguments for relativism defend it as a theory that explains how language actually works: the fact that the proposition expressed is true or false only with respect to a context of assessment would explain the characteristic behavior of certain uses of language in regard to phenomena such as faultless disagreement and retraction. In this paper, I pursue a different strategy. In particular, I argue that we should adopt relativism also as the way language should work. Relativism implements what I call “the relativist stance”, which is the one to adopt if we want to act in accordance with values, such as tolerance and progress, that are widely seen as the ones that democratic societies should promote. Contextualism fails to implement this stance, but expressivism, if understood in a certain way, just puts it in different words. This is in accordance with the view also defended in this paper that certain versions of relativism and expressivism are equivalent with respect to the aspects that are relevant to their ability to implement the relativist stance.
Contextualism and Warranted Assertion
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 2007
Contextualists offer ‘high-low standards’ practical cases to show that a variety of knowledge standards are in play in different ordinary contexts. These cases show nothing of the sort, I maintain. However Keith DeRose gives an ingenious argument that standards for knowledge do go up in high-stakes cases. According to the knowledge account of assertion (Kn), only knowledge warrants assertion. Kn combined with the context sensitivity of assertability yields contextualism about knowledge. But is Kn correct? I offer a rival account of warranted assertion and argue that it beats Kn as a response to the 'knowledge' version of Moore's Paradox.
"Contextualism and the Factivity of Knowledge"
in D. Lukasiewicz & R. Pouivet (eds.), Scientific Knowledge and Common Knowledge, 2009
Analytic epistemology in the post-Gettier era has mainly focused on the task of providing an analysis, perhaps a definition, of the "common" notion of knowledge. In the last two or three decades, this project has seen a major "linguistic turn" (Ludlow 2005), through the increased reliance, in contemporary debates, on syntactic, semantic and pragmatic "evidence" about usual (uses of) linguistic constructions in terms of know, the main working assumption being that the common notion of knowledgethat is, the way we (ought to) commonly think about knowledgeis best reflected in the way we commonly talk about knowledge. A consequence is that instead of trying to spell out directly the conditions for knowledge, the focus is on trying to spell out the conditions for the truth of knowledge attributions.
2009
The paper explicates a new way to model the context-sensitivity of 'knows', namely a way that suggests a close connection between the content of 'knows' in a context C and what is pragmatically presupposed in C. After explicating my new approach in the first half of the paper and arguing that it is explanatorily superior to standard accounts of epistemic contextualism, the paper points, in its second half, to some interesting new features of the emerging account, such as its compatibility with the intuitions of Moorean dogmatists. Finally, the paper shows that the account defended is not subject to the most prominent and familiar philosophical objections to epistemic contextualism discussed in the recent literature.