Standard philosophical explanations of the concept of knowledge invoke a personal goal of having true beliefs, and explain the other requirements for knowledge as indicating the best way to achieve that goal. In this highly original book, Steven L. Reynolds argues instead that the concept of knowledge functions to express a naturally developing kind of social control, a complex social norm, and that the main purpose of our practice of saying and thinking that people 'know' is to improve our system for exchanging information, which is testimony. He makes illuminating comparisons of the knowledge norm of testimony with other complex social norms - such as those requiring proper clothing, respectful conversation, and the complementary virtues of tact and frankness - and shows how this account fits with our concept of knowledge as studied in recent analytic epistemology. His book will interest a range of readers in epistemology, psychology, and sociology.

Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions

Knowledge as Acceptable Testimony

In the past few years there has been a turn towards evaluating the empirical foundation of epistemic contextualism using formal (rather than armchair) experimental methods. By-and-large, the results of these experiments have not supported the original motivation for epistemic contextualism. That is partly because experiments have only uncovered effects of changing context on knowledge ascriptions in limited experimental circumstances (when contrast is present, for example), and partly because existing experiments have not been designed to distinguish between contextualism and one of its main competing theories, subject-sensitive invariantism. In this paper, we discuss how a particular, “third-person”, experimental design is needed to provide evidence that would support contextualism over subject-sensitive invariantism. In spite of the theoretical significance of third-person knowledge ascriptions for debates surrounding contextualism, no formal experiments evaluating such ascriptions that assess contextualist claims have previously been conducted. In this paper, we conduct an experiment specifically designed to examine that central gap in contextualism’s empirical foundation. The results of our experiment provide crucial support for epistemic contextualism over subject-sensitive invariantism.

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Third‐person knowledge ascriptions: A crucial experiment for contextualism

Having entered into the problem structuring methods, system dynamics (SD) is an approach, among systems’ methodologies, which claims to recognize the main structures of socio-economic behaviors. However, the concern for building or discovering strong philosophical underpinnings of SD, undoubtedly playing an important role in the modeling process, is a long-standing issue, in a way that there is a considerable debate about the assumptions or the philosophical foundations of it. In this paper, with a new perspective, we have explored theory of knowledge in SD models and found strange similarities between classic epistemological concepts such as justification and truth, and the mechanism of obtaining knowledge in SD models. In this regard, we have discussed related theories of epistemology and based on this analysis, have suggested some implications for moderating common problems in the modeling process of SD. Furthermore, this research could be considered a reword of system dynamics modeling principles in terms of theory of knowledge.

Theory of Knowledge in System Dynamics Models

Interest-Relative Invariantism

©  Matt Weiner  M    investigates knowledge through the semantics of the word ‘know’. Contextualists, relativists, and various kinds of invariantist posit dierent kinds of rules for the truth of sentences containing the word ‘know’; and much of the dispute among these three parties concerns which rules best capture our actual use of the word ‘know’. These parties share the presupposition that our use of the word ‘know’ will be best captured by some consistent semantics. I will argue that this presupposition is false. Our use of the word ‘know’ is best captured by a set of inference rules that I will call collectively the Knowledge Principles, and the Knowledge Principles are inconsistent. This is a radical thesis; it will require an elaborate argument to show that it is better to admit that ‘know’ lacks consistent semantics than to reject one of the Knowledge Principles. However, the thesis is radical only at the theoretical level; it does not call for a radical revision of our practice of knowledge ascription. In particular, even if knowledge-talk is inconsistent, we need not and should not abandon it. The cases in which the inconsistency might lead to actual confusion are rare enough that knowledge-talk is an ecient way of communicating. In cases of actual confusion, consistent constructions are available to clarify what is meant, but it would be inecient to abandon the word ‘know’ wholesale in favor of these constructions. The inconsistency of ‘know’ is mostly harmless.

Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions

Citations

Knowledge as Acceptable Testimony

Third‐person knowledge ascriptions: A crucial experiment for contextualism

Theory of Knowledge in System Dynamics Models

Interest-Relative Invariantism

The (mostly harmless) Inconsistency of Knowledge Ascriptions

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