Brains, Persons, and Society *** ABSTRACTS    Cervelli, Persone e Società ***ABSTRACTS

Michael Blome-Tillmann
University College, Oxford

Contextualism and the Epistemological Enterprise

Epistemic contextualism (EC) is primarily a semantic view, viz. the view that ‘knowledge’- ascriptions can change their contents with the conversational context. According to EC, ‘know’ is an indexical expression. Notwithstanding this purely linguistic characterisation of EC, contextualists have traditionally argued that their views have considerable philosophical impact, this being due to the alleged fact that their linguistic views about ‘know’ provide the resources for a resolution of sceptical puzzles. In this paper I address objections to EC calling into question its epistemological significance.

In the first section of the paper I sketch David Lewis’s contextualist account of ‘knowledge’ and his attempt to resolve sceptical puzzles. Lewis’s account consists, firstly, of the following analysis of the satisfaction of ‘know’ in a given context C: (L) x satisfies ‘knows p’ in C ↔ x’s evidence eliminates every ¬p-world, except for those that are properly ignored in C.

and, secondly, of a set of rules determining which worlds cannot be properly ignored in a given context C. The rule doing the explanatory work with regard to sceptical puzzles is Lewis’s “Rule of Attention”:

(RA) If w is attended to by the speakers in C, then w cannot be properly ignored in C.

As Lewis points out, (RA) boils down to the apparent triviality that “a possibility not ignored at all is ipso facto not properly ignored.” I sketch how Lewis attempts to resolve sceptical puzzles by means of (L) and (RA). The second section of the paper introduces a new contextualist account. The account of EC I have in mind differs from Lewis’s original theory in replacing (RA) with what I call the Rule of Conversational Presupposition (RCP): (RCP) If w is incompatible with the conversational  

presuppositions of the conversational participants in C, then w can be properly ignored in C.

I then show how a contextualist account resting on (RCP) rather than (RA) can resolve sceptical puzzles. The remainder of the paper addresses objections to EC relating to its epistemological significance. It is argued that my new account can counter all of these objections. The first objection addressed goes back to Jason Stanley. According to Stanley, the contextualist has a problem with the following dialogue:

“ZOO:

A: I know that is a zebra.

B: But can you rule out its being a cleverly painted mule?

A: I guess I can't rule that out.

B: So you admit that you don't know that's a zebra, and so you were wrong earlier?

A: I didn’t say I did.”

Stanley remarks with regard to this dialogue that A’s final utterance, according to the contextualist’s semantics, is true. But this seems an odd result, for it is rather “difficult to make sense of A’s denial except as a lie.” The paper shows that on my new account, Stanley’s objection misfires, because there is no change in the semantic value of ‘know’ throughout the dialogue.

The second objection to standard EC I address is due to Michael Williams and Robert Fogelin. Both argue that Lewis’s (RA) is too strong in making it too difficult to satisfy ‘knows’: the mere mentioning of a sceptical hypothesis can make us cease to satisfy ‘knows’. I agree with Williams and Fogelin, showing that on my new account, the problem does not arise. In fact, on my new account, the contextualist cannot only defend our Anti- Sceptical Intuitions (ASI):

(ASI) People often speak truly when they assert ‘I know p.’

but also what I call Fogelin’s Intuition (FI):

(FI) People often speak truly when they assert ‘I know p’ in contexts of epistemological

enquiry and discussion.

This is due to the fact that even in contexts of epistemological enquiry we can presuppose that we are not in sceptical scenarios—independently of whether speakers allude to such scenarios or not.

The third objection to standard EC that my new account counters is due to Ernest Sosa (cp. also Kornblith and Lehrer). Sosa argues that “The main thesis of [EC] has considerable plausibility as a thesis in linguistics or in philosophy of language. In applying it to epistemology, however, it is possible to overreach […].” Sosa’s objection rests, firstly, on the observation that disquotation of indexical expressions fails across contexts and, secondly, on the assumption that contexts of epistemological enquiry are inevitably sceptical contexts, in the sense that in every such context one cannot satisfy ‘knows p’ for any p about the external world. Sosa’s argument is shown to fail for our new account of EC, for this account avoids Sosa’s assumption. Finally, the paper addresses an objection to EC that is due to Tim Williamson. Williamson argues that contextualists qua epistemologists cannot assert (ASI). This is because, firstly, knowledge is the norm of assertion and, secondly, knowledge is factive: whenever we ascribe ‘x knows p’ or ‘x satisfies ‘knows p’’ we conversationally commit ourselves to p

(factivity). Since, according to Williamson’s Rule of Assertion, we are only entitled to assert

what we know, by asserting ‘x knows p’ or ‘x satisfies ‘knows p’’, we implicate that we satisfy ‘knows p’ in our own context, which is, according to standard EC, false in epistemological contexts. Thus, contextualists qua epistemologists cannot felicitously assert that people ordinarily satisfy ‘knows p’.

I admit to Williamson that this is a significant blow to standard EC, but point out that my new theory can avoid this result, because it is not subject to the problem that epistemological contexts are inevitably sceptical contexts. The paper concludes that the most pertinent objections to EC calling into question its epistemological significance can be countered by my new account.