According to a recent view, known as the 'pragmatic encroachment' thesis, an agent’s non-truth-related factors are relevant to the epistemic status of her beliefs. In particular, in addition to truth-related factors, practical factors are said to be relevant to the question whether or not true belief amounts to knowledge. Despite the intuitive appeal of the thesis, however, it is puzzling how practical factors can impact the truth-related factors that ground the epistemic status of one's beliefs. In this paper, I will distinguish between a strong and a weak sense of the way in which practical factors are said to be thus relevant. Their differences are explicated in terms of the nature and the extent to which practical factors are said to impact the epistemic status of one's beliefs. I begin by considering a strong version of the thesis that suggests principles according to which the practical rationality of one's actions is a necessary condition on knowledge and justification. Having noted an inadequacy in the formulation of such principles, the arguments in their support are subsequently stated and criticized. Finally, I identify two modest versions of the thesis of pragmatic encroachment and argue that they, too, fail to explain how practical factors can bear on the epistemic status of one's beliefs.

Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions

Varieties of Pragmatic Encroachment

My paper aims to account for the possibility of disagreements concerning what we know; for clearly, people disagree about what they know. More precisely, my goal is to explain how a contextualist theory of knowledge attributions can explain the existence of disagreement among speakers. My working hypothesis is that genuine epistemic disagreement is possible only under the assumption that the meaning of the word “knowledge” is governed by contexts that are objective, in the sense that that the content of the word “knowledge” is fixed for all speakers sharing a common conversational goal. The paper is divided into two sections. In the first section, I explain why current versions of epistemic contextualism cannot account for epistemic disagreement. In the second section, following Christopher Gauker’s theory of linguistic communication, I offer my own contextualist solution to the problem of epistemic disagreement.

Additional excerpts

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Epistemic Disagreements: A Solution for Contextualists

Contextualism and the Reference Class Problem

Many contextualist accounts in epistemology appeal to ordinary language and everyday practice as grounds for positing a low-standards knowledge (knowledge L ) that contrasts with high-standards prevalent in epistemology (knowledge H ). We compare these arguments to arguments from the height of “ordinary language” philosophy in the mid 20th century and find that all such arguments face great difficulties. We find a powerful argument for the legitimacy and necessity of knowledge L (but not of knowledge H ). These appeals to practice leave us with reasons to accept knowledge L in the face of radical doubts raised by skeptics. We conclude by arguing that by relegating knowledge H to isolated contexts, the contextualist fails to deal with the skeptical challenge head-on. Knowledge H and knowledge L represent competing, incompatible intuitions about knowledge, and we must choose between them. A fallibilist conception of knowledge, formed with proper attention to radical doubts, can address the skeptical challenge without illicit appeal to everyday usage.

The Ordinary Language Case for Contextualism and the Relevance of Radical Doubt

It is a familiar criticism of Subject-Sensitive Invariantism that the view makes incorrect predictions about cases in which the attributor of knowledge is in a high-stakes situation and the subject of the attribution in a low-stakes situation. In a recent paper in this journal, Brian Kim has argued that the mentioned type of case should be ignored, since the relevant knowledge ascriptions are inappropriate in virtue of violating an epistemic norm of presupposing. I show, pace Kim, that the mentioned utterances do not carry factivity presuppositions. To this end I discuss a phenomenon known as presupposition suspension, which is widely associated with the presuppositions of epistemic factives such as know that p or discover that p. I argue further that the problem of unknown presuppositions discussed by Kim can be circumvented by slightly amending the cases at hand. In particular, I demonstrate that factivity presuppositions are unobjectionable in problem cases in which the high-stakes ascriber knows the presuppositions at issue to be true.

Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions

Citations

Varieties of Pragmatic Encroachment

Epistemic Disagreements: A Solution for Contextualists

Contextualism and the Reference Class Problem

The Ordinary Language Case for Contextualism and the Relevance of Radical Doubt

Subject-sensitive invariantism, high-stakes/low-stakes cases, and presupposition suspension

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