Keith DeRose

Thomas Blackson does not question that my argument in section 2 of “Assertion, Knowledge and Context” establishes the conclusion that the standards that comprise a truth-condition for “I know that P” vary with context, but does claim that this does not suffice to validly demonstrate the truth of contextualism, because this variance in standards can be handled by what we will here call Subject-Sensitive Invariantism (SSI), and so does not demand a contextualist treatment. According to SSI, the varying standards that comprise a truth-condition of “I know that P” are sensitive to factors that attach to the speaker as the putative subject of knowledge, rather than as the speaker of the knowledge attribution. That is, according to SSI, these factors of the subject’s context determine a single set of standards that govern when the subject himself, or any other speaker, including those not engaged in conversation with the subject, can truthfully say that the subject “knows.” Thus, we do not get the result that contextualists insist on: that one speaker can truthfully say the subject “knows,” while another speaker, in a different and more demanding context, can say that the subject does “not know”, even though the two speakers are speaking of the same subject knowing (or not knowing) the same proposition at the same time. Given the possibility of SSI, Blackson concludes that I “either assumed without argument that [SSI] is false or failed to distinguish the different ways the standard for knowledge might be determined.” I indeed have long assumed that SSI can’t be right, and so have taken a different form of invariantism to be the real threat to contextualism. But since SSI, and views like it, now seem to be getting considerable attention, it is worth articulating why I find it unpromising.

What happens to the "conversational score" when speakers in a conversation push the score for a context-sensitive term in different directions? In epistemology, contextualists are often construed as holding that both the skeptic ("You don't know!") and her opponent ("Oh, yes I do!") speak truthfully when they debate. This assumes a "multiple scoreboards" version of contextualism. But contextualists themselves typically opt for "single scoreboard" views on which such apparently competing claims really do conflict. This paper explores several single scoreboard options for contextualists, opting in the end for the "gap view," on which neither of our debaters speaks truthfully.

The first paper in this section, by Keith DeRose, questions evidentialism in part with this challenging question: Why should evidence ground the definition of ‘epistemically ought’ rather than knowledge? He offers cases similar to ones from Axtell and Baehr in the previous section (indeed, similar to those of Kornblith’s challenge in ‘Evidentialism’ in the first place) where it seems to him that—at least in a permissible sense, if not a preferable sense—we ought not say that _S_ ought to believe _p_ even though _p_ fits _S_’s evidence, because were _S_ to believe _p_ she would fail to know _p_.

Direct Realism often emerges as a solution to a certain type of problem. Hume and, especially, Berkeley, wielding some of the most powerful arguments of 18th Century philosophy, forcefully attacked the notion that there could be good inferences from the occurrence of one’s sensations to the existence of external, mind-independent bodies. Given the success of these attacks, and also given the assumption, made by Berkeley and arguably by Hume as well, that our knowledge of and rational belief in the existence of material objects would depend upon there being such good inferences, a problem arises: We cannot know of or rationally believe in the existence of material objects. Reid’s Direct Realism then emerges as the solution to this problem. Reid admits the success of Berkeley’s and Hume’s attacks against the possibility of successfully grounding our material world beliefs on inferences from our sensations,[1] but claims that our belief in the existence of material objects can be perfectly rationally acceptable, and can amount to knowledge, despite the lack of such inferences. Though he did not use the terminology, it seems to be Reid’s position – and it’s this position that I will be referring to as his “Direct Realism” here – that certain perceptual beliefs whose content is such that they imply the existence of material objects are properly basic: they are rationally held, and if true can amount to knowledge, without having to be based on any other beliefs, including, most notably, beliefs about one’s own sensory experiences.