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Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions

Believing, Knowing, Acting

I am concerned with epistemic closure—the phenomenon in which some knowledge requires other knowledge. In particular, I defend a version of the closure principle in terms of analyticity; if an agent S knows that p is true and that q is an analytic part of p, then S knows that q. After targeting the relevant notion of analyticity, I argue that this principle accommodates intuitive cases and possesses the theoretical resources to avoid the preface paradox.

Additional excerpts

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Knowledge is closed under analytic content

Contextualism and Levels of Scrutiny

For a putative knower S and a proposition P, two types of skepticism can be distinguished, depending on the conclusions they draw: outer skepticism, which concludes that S does not know that P, and inner skepticism, which concludes that S does not know whether P. This paper begins by showing that outer skepticism has undesirable consequences because that S does not know that P presupposes P, and inner skepticism does not have this undesirable consequence since that S does not know whether P does not presuppose P. We indicate that the two types of skepticism aim to different loci of doubts: while outer skepticism doubts whether we can gain an epistemic warrant for the actuality, inner skepticism doubts whether we can gain epistemic identification of the actuality. It is further indicated that responses to skepticism from externalist theories, as well as from fallibilist internalist theories, can only respond to outer skepticism but not to inner skepticism.

Skeptical Conclusions

In this dissertation I study and empirically test whether belief attributions are context-sensitive, i.e., whether the truth value of a belief report of the form ‘A believes that S’ is sensitive to contextual parameters. More specifically, I examine whether the Referential Knowledge that the Audience possesses (that is, whether the hearer of a report is familiar with the name employed in it) and/or the Stakes for the agent at the time of attribution, affect patterns of attribution in a way such that the variation in them causes that a single report be correctly made in one context but not in other while nothing in the mental state of the agent has changed. To this end, I designed original experimental material and tested it on several samples of undergraduates at the Universitat de Barcelona and Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. I here make an analysis of methodological approaches in empiric testing of some philosophical matters and offer considerations about experimentation on belief ascriptions in particular. I conclude the data gathered supports the hypothesis that there are contextualist patterns of belief attribution as regards the Referential Knowledge of the Audience parameter, but not for the Stakes variable.

background

/pdf/ascriptions-in-context-an-experimental-study-on-the-context-5ab9kqw1xy.pdf

Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions

Citations

Believing, Knowing, Acting

Knowledge is closed under analytic content

Contextualism and Levels of Scrutiny

Skeptical Conclusions

Ascriptions in context: An Experimental Study on the Context-sensitivity of Belief Reports

Related Papers (5)

Knowledge and lotteries

Knowledge and Practical Interests

Contextualism, skepticism, and the structure of reasons

Solving the Skeptical Problem

Knowledge and Its Limits