Third‐person knowledge ascriptions: A crucial experiment for contextualism

Grindrod, Jumbly; Andow, James; Hansen, Nat

doi:10.1111/mila.12196

Cited by 11 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 41 publications

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“…And we develop more natural vignettes, applied to a diverse population of participants, implementing the experimental, natural, and ecological solutions to the productive limit problem. And suppose, as some evidence currently suggests (Hansen & Chemla 2013, Francis et al 2019, Dinges & Zakkou 2021, Grindrod et al 2019, that the results fall in line with what epistemic contextualism would predict: we find that subjects' reported judgments about epistemic situations predictably vary along multiple context-variant dimensions. Which of the following broadly contextualist views would this data support:…”

Section: The Ecological Solutionsupporting

confidence: 76%

Knowledge, the concept know, and the word know: considerations from polysemy and pragmatics

Dudley,

Vogel

2023

Synthese

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A recent focus on philosophical methodology has reinvigorated ordinary language philosophy with the contention that philosophical inquiry is better served by attending to the ordinary use of language. Taking cues from findings in the social sciences that deploy methods utilizing language, various ordinary language philosophers embrace a guiding mandate: that ordinary language usage is more reflective of our linguistic and conceptual competencies than standard philosophical methods. We analyze two hypotheses that are implicit in the research from which ordinary language approaches take their cues. This pair of optimistic assumptions (a) bind word meanings to properties of their corresponding concepts and (b) regard language as a direct reflection of our underlying cognitive processes and competencies. Polysemy and pragmatics complicate each assumption. Because the ordinary language philosopher's methodological mandate compels us to consider how individuals process the utterances they encounter in deciphering the communicative intentions of speakers, failing to attend to the import of polysemy and pragmatics in philosophical and empirical methods has the potential to frustrate the aims of their insightful mandate. The significance of those two complications is worked out with the case study of knowledge.

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Section: The Ecological Solutionsupporting

confidence: 76%

Knowledge, the concept know, and the word know: considerations from polysemy and pragmatics

Dudley,

Vogel

2023

Synthese

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“…7 By asserting the second sentence in (9) the speaker figuratively conveys what she has already explicitly stated-that the addressee is very special to her. And by asserting the second sentence in (10) the speaker figuratively conveys what she has already explicitly stated-that she has been waiting for a very long time. Since Hannah's utterance in High Stakes* isn't repetitive or redundant in the same manner as ( 9) and ( 10) are, I conclude that Hannah's 'knowledge'-denial in High Stakes* doesn't conversationally implicate or convey in any other sense that Hannah cannot rule out that the bank has changed its hours.…”

Section: Contextual Suspension Of Implicaturesmentioning

confidence: 95%

Moderate pragmatic invariantism and contextual implicature cancellation

Blome-Tillmann

2021

Analysis

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Moderate Pragmatic Invariantism (MPI) has been criticized in the literature for postulating implicatures that are not straightforwardly cancellable. Defenders of MPI have responded that the data are not as clear-cut as one might wish. This paper grants the defenders of MPI, for the sake of argument, that the implicatures in question are cancellable and then turns this admission against them. In particular, the paper offers Bank Case variants in which the conversational implicatures postulated by MPI are contextually suspended – and thus cancelled. Since our intuitions do not vary between the original Bank Case and these novel types of cases, the explanation offered by MPI must be mistaken. Our varying truth-value intuitions in the Bank Cases cannot be accounted for by means of conversational implicatures.

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“…21 Other worries remain, and I will point them out in what follows. 22 I will 20 An analogous story can be told to accommodate salient alternative effects in third-person cases as confirmed in Grindrod et al (2019). Stakes effects in third-person cases would be more troublesome.…”

Section: Objectionsmentioning

confidence: 98%

Knowledge and non-traditional factors: prospects for doxastic accounts

Dinges

2020

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Knowledge ascriptions depend on so-called non-traditional factors. For instance, we become less inclined to ascribe knowledge when it's important to be right, or once we are reminded of possible sources of error. A number of potential explanations of this data have been proposed in the literature. They include revisionary semantic explanations based on epistemic contextualism and revisionary metaphysical explanations based on anti-intellectualism. Classical invariantists reject such revisionary proposals and hence face the challenge to provide an alternative account. The most prominent strategy here appeals to Gricean pragmatics. This paper focuses on a slightly less prominent strategy, which is based on the idea that non-traditional factors affect knowledge ascriptions because they affect what the putative knower believes. I will call this strategy doxasticism. The full potential of doxasticism is rarely appreciated in the literature and numerous unwarranted concerns have been raised. The goal of this paper is to present the strongest form of doxasticism and then to point out the genuine limitations of this position. I also sketch a closely related, more promising account.

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Third‐person knowledge ascriptions: A crucial experiment for contextualism

Cited by 11 publications

References 41 publications

Knowledge, the concept know, and the word know: considerations from polysemy and pragmatics

Knowledge, the concept know, and the word know: considerations from polysemy and pragmatics

Moderate pragmatic invariantism and contextual implicature cancellation

Knowledge and non-traditional factors: prospects for doxastic accounts

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