The Case for Contextualism: Knowledge, Skepticism, and Context, Vol. 1
Draft of 10/18/08
Keith DeRose [email protected]
Chapter 1: Contextualism, Invariantism, Skepticism, and 1 What Goes On in Ordinary Conversation
Chapter 2: The Ordinary Language Basis for Contextualism 50
Chapter 3: Assertion, Knowledge, and Context 87
Chapter 4: Single Scoreboard Semantics 138
Chapter 5: “Bamboozled by Our Own Words”: Semantic 165 Blindness and Some Objections to Contextualism
Chapter 6: Now You Know It, Now You Don’t: 201 Intellectualism, Contextualism, and Subject-Sensitive Invariantism
Chapter 7: Knowledge, Assertion and Action: Contextualism 246 vs. Subject-Sensitive Invariantism
References 302
Acknowledgements vii
Chapter 1: Contextualism, Invariantism, Skepticism, and 1 What Goes On in Ordinary Conversation
1. Contextualism and the Old Bank Cases 1
2. Cases Involving Speakers in Different Conversations Talking About the Same 4 Subject
3. Contextualism and Invariantism 7
4. “Strength of Epistemic Position,” Comparative Conditionals, and Generic 8 Contextualism
5. Semantic Mechanism? 10
6. Which Claims to Take Seriously and the “Floor” of “Know(s)” 15
7. Is This Epistemology or Philosophy of Language? 20
8. Contextualism Regarding Other Epistemic Terms 22
9. Contextualism is Not a Thesis about the Structure of Knowledge or of Justification 23
10. “Subject” Vs. “Attributor” Contextualism 24
11. Intellectualism and the Distinction between “Classical” and “Subject-Sensitive” 26 Invariantism
12. A Brief History of Contextualism 28
13. Contextualism, Invariantism, and Relevant Alternatives 32
14. Against Contextualist Versions of RA That Tie the Content of Knowledge 37 Attributing Claim Directly to What the Range of Relevant Alternatives Is
15. Against Contrastivism 41
16. The Contextualist Approach to Skepticism and to What Goes on in Ordinary 44 Conversation
17. Relativism, Fervent Invariantism, and the Plan for this Volume 47
-ii- Contents and Acknowledgements
Chapter 2: The Ordinary Language Basis for Contextualism 50
1. The Main Argument for Contextualism 50
2. Mutually Reinforcing Strands of Evidence 52
3. Truth/Falsity Asymmetry 54
4. The Best Cases: Standards Appropriate to Practical Context 56
5. The Best Cases: Cases Involving No Dispute, No Reversals, and No Exceedingly 59 High, “Philosophical” Standards
6. Problems with First-Person Cases 62
7. Third-Person Cases 65
8. The Importance of Arguments from Ordinary Language 69
Appendix. Similar Arguments for Other Contextualisms: But I Still Don’t Know Who 73 Hong Oak Yun Is!
Chapter 3: Assertion, Knowledge, and Context 87
1. The Classical Invariantist’s Warranted Assertability Objection 88
2. The Myth of Jank Fraction: A Cautionary Tale 90
3. Lame WAMs and the Warranted Assertability Objection to Contextualism 92
4. The Generality Objection 97
5. The Knowledge Account of Assertion 100
6. The Knowledge Account of Assertion Contextualized 106
7. Assertability and Knowledge: Getting the Connection Right 109
8. The Argument from Variable Assertability Conditions 114
9. An Argument for Contextualism? 115
10. The Generality Objection Defeated 117
-iii- Contents and Acknowledgements
11. Check the Negations! 120
Appendix: Rysiew’s and Unger’s Invariantist Accounts 125
Chapter 4: Single Scoreboard Semantics 138
1. Contextualism and Philosophical Debates over Skepticism 138
2. Contextualism and Disagreement 139
3. The Type of Debate Addressed Here 142
4. Multiple, Personal Scoreboards 144
5. Single Scoreboard Semantics 145
6. Higher Standards Prevail, So the Skeptic Wins 147
7. Does It Matter if the Skeptic “Wins”? 149
8. Veto Power 150
9. Reasonableness Views: Pure Reasonableness and “Binding Arbitration” 152
10. The Exploding Scoreboard 154
11. The “Gap” View 155
12. One-Way Disputes and the Asymmetrical Gap View 160
13. The Asymmetrical Gap View Applied to Relations between Earlier and Later 161 Claims Made During the Same Two-Way Dispute
14. Is There a Good Objection to Contextualism to be Found in Its Inability to Handle 162 Cases of Disagreement?
Chapter 5: “Bamboozled by Our Own Words”: Semantic 165 Blindness and Some Objections to Contextualism
1. Methodology, Straightforward Data, and Objections to Contextualism Based on 165
-iv- Contents and Acknowledgements Fancier Features of Ordinary Usage
2. The Objection from Judgments of Comparative Content 167
3. “Semantic Blindness”: Get Used to It! 171
4. The Objection from Metalinguistic Claims 172
5. Hawthorne and Belief Reports 174
6. “Know(s)” and “Tall”: A Better Objection Involving Belief Reports 180
7. “Know(s)” and “Tall”: Some Speech Reports 184
8. “Know(s)” and “Tall”: “I Never Said That!” 184
9. “Know(s)” and “Tall”: Summary 187
10. Schiffer’s Attack on Contextualist Solutions to Skepticism: Being “Bamboozled by 188 Our Own Words”
Appendix: An Objection to Contextualism from a (Relative) Lack of Clarifying Devices 193 for “Know(s)”?
Chapter 6: Now You Know It, Now You Don’t: 201 Intellectualism, Contextualism, and Subject-Sensitive Invariantism
1. Intellectualism, SSI, and Contextualism 201
2. The Problem with Denying Intellectualism 205
3. Stakes and Confidence Levels 206
4. “Now You Know It, Now You Don’t” Problems 210
5. KAA to the Rescue? 213
6. Does SSI Have Good Company in its Misery? 214
7. Contextualism and the Advantages of Intellectualism 215
8. Contextextualism and Simple “Now You Know It, Now You Don’t” Sentences: The 216
-v- Contents and Acknowledgements Apparent Problem and Two Unsatisfying Contextualist Responses
9. Why Contextextualism Does Not Endorse the Simple “Now You Know It, Now You 221 Don’t” Sentences
10. The Fortified Objection: “What I Said” 224
11. Elusive Knowledge? 230
12. Lewis and Semantic Ascent 233
13. The Fallacy of Semantic Descent 236
14. Dretske and the Fallacy of Semantic Descent? 241
Chapter 7: Knowledge, Assertion and Action: Contextualism 246 vs. Subject-Sensitive Invariantism
1. Contextualism, SSI, and First-Person Cases 246
2. Third-Person Cases that Vindicate Contextualism 250
3. The Projection Defense 254
4. Other Third-Person Cases: A Big, Ugly Tie? 259
5. Some Uses of “Know(s)” in Evaluating, Explaining, and Predicting Actions and 262 Assertions
6. Hawthorne’s Charges that Contextualism Breaks the Connections that Knowledge 264 Bears to Assertion and to Practical Reasoning
7. Contextualism and Some Strange Sentences Concerning Knowledge and 265 Assertability
8. Contextualism and Hawthorne’s Strange Sentence Concerning Knowledge and 273 Practical Reasoning
9. Can the Contextualist Claim that Knowledge Is the Norm of Assertion? 280
10. Principles Connecting Knowledge with Action 285
11. Multi-Tasking and the Case of the Walking Talker 293
-vi- Contents and Acknowledgements 12. Contextualism’s Advantage over SSI in Accounting for Uses of “Know(s)” Made in 296 Connection with Evaluations, Predictions, and Explanations of Actions
13. The Need for the Flexibility Contextualism Posits 300
References 302
Acknowledgements
I have been intermittently obsessing over the issues covered in this book since my second year of graduate school. (In fact, though I haven’t checked this, I suspect that I composed some of the sentences in this book over 20 years ago, as bits of my grad school papers were incorporated into my dissertation, then into early papers, and now into this book.) During that long time, I have greatly benefited from many discussions – in person, by e-mail, sometimes on-line at philosophical weblogs, and even occasionally by old-fashioned mail – with many excellent philosophers. I know I am forgetting many, but I thank all those who have helped me with these ideas, including the following people, whose kind help I do recall right now: Bob Adams, Kent Bach, Matt Benton, Michael Bergmann, Paul Boghossian, David Braun, Jessica Brown, Tony Brueckner, Stewart Cohen, Earl Conee, Troy Cross, Rachel DeRose, Keith Donnellan, Delia Graff Fara, Richard Feldman, Graeme Forbes, Alvin Goldman, Richard Grandy, John Greco, John Hawthorne, Richard Heck, Chris Hitchcock, Thomas Hofweber, Larry Horn, Michael Huemer, Ernie Lepore, David Lewis, Peter Ludlow, Bill Lycan, John MacFarlane, Michael McGlone, Matt McGrath, Ruth Millikan, Jennifer Nagel, Ram Neta, Michael Nelson, Duncan Pritchard, Patrick Rysiew, Jonathan Schaffer, Stephen Schiffer, Ernie Sosa, Robert Stalnaker, Steve Stich, Zoltan Szabo, Ted Warfield, Brian Weatherson, and Timothy Williamson.
I also thank the audiences at and the organizers of the following events where I gave talks in which I floated some of the ideas that appear here: the 1997 International Colloquium on Cognitive Science in San Sebastian, Spain; the 20th World Congress of Philosophy in Boston, Massachusetts; the Fifth Annual Franklin & Marshall College Symposium in Metaphysics and Epistemology; the 1999 Spindel Conference at the University of Memphis; the 2002 Rocky Mountain Student Philosophy Conference at the University of Colorado at Boulder; the 2002 "Contextualism in Epistemology and Beyond" conference at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; the 2003 University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Colloquium; the 2004 conference on "Epistemological Contextualism" at the University of Stirling; the 2005 Rutgers Epistemology Conference; and colloquia for the philosophy departments at Tulane University; Temple University; University of Connecticut, Storrs; University of California, Los Angeles; C.U.N.Y. Graduate Center; Fordham University; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; University of Virginia, Charlottesville; Rice University; Syracuse University; Yale University; Rutgers University; University of Vermont; University of
-vii- Contents and Acknowledgements Notre Dame; New York University; Brown University; University of Miami; Cornell University; Saint Louis University; and University at Buffalo—SUNY.
I owe special thanks to a few philosophers who have helped me the most. My first job after receiving my PhD was as an assistant professor at the philosophy department at New York University. Happily for me, the environment there was a great and supportive one for doing good philosophical writing, and my philosophical education continued during the three formative years I spent there. This was largely due to my extremely helpful colleagues, John Carroll and Roy Sorensen, who were two of my main teachers during that time. In more recent years, I have profited much from many discussions, and even more e-mail exchanges, with Jon Kvanvig and Jason Stanley.
My greatest philosophical debts are to Rogers Albritton and Peter Unger. It was in discussions with my teacher and dissertation advisor at UCLA, Rogers Albritton, that my thinking on the topics of this book began and began to take shape. I was very fortunate to be among the many philosophers to benefit so much from long discussions with the Socrates of our age. Perhaps my greatest thanks are due to my friend, Peter Unger, for his important writings on knowledge and skepticism, from which I learned much; for three years of almost daily philosophical discussions, many of which were on the topics of this book, and almost all of which were enjoyable and enlightening; and for his many comments on various drafts of early papers of mine on these topics. There is a lot of material in here that would or will be very new to Peter and my other old NYU colleagues, John and Roy, and even more in here that would be new to Prof. Albritton, were he still alive to read it; my thinking on these matters has come a long way since I worked with them. But it would not have gotten anywhere close to where it is were it not for the jump- start their help gave me early in philosophical career.
Material from the following papers of mine has been incorporated into this book:
“Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (1992): pp. 913-929.
“Contextualism: An Explanation and Defense,” in J. Greco and E. Sosa, ed., The Blackwell Guide to Epistemology (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), pp. 187-205.
“Now You Know It, Now You Don’t,” Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy (Bowling Green, Ohio: Philosophy Documentation Center, 2000); Vol. V, Epistemology, pp. 91-106.
“Assertion, Knowledge, and Context,” Philosophical Review 111 (2002): 167-203.
“The Problem with Subject-Sensitive Invariantism,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 68 (2004): 346-350.
With kind permission from Springer Science+Business Media: “Single Scoreboard Semantics,” Philosophical Studies 119 (2004): 1-21.
-viii- Contents and Acknowledgements “The Ordinary Language Basis for Contextualism and the New Invariantism,” The Philosophical Quarterly 55 (2005): 172-198.
“‘Bamboozled by Our Own Words’: Semantic Blindness and Some Objections to Contextualism,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (2006): 316-338.
-ix- Contents and Acknowledgements