Keith DeRose

In “Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions,” I argue that advocates of the “Relevant Alternatives” theory of knowledge fall into certain mistakes result if they tie the content of a knowledge attribution, on a given occasion of use, too tightly to what the range of relevant alternatives is on that occasion, and I sketch an alternative approach to the issues involved that avoids such mistakes. In “The Shifting Content of Knowledge Attributions,” Anthony Brueckner charges that my own account of these matters falls to an objection of his. But Brueckner is wrong about this, as I’ll here argue.

The key test cases for deciding between my brand of contextualism and Jennifer Nagel’s brand of invariantism are the third-person examples. As matters currently stand, first-person cases, like my original Bank cases (pp. 1-2), are pretty useless here. Nagel can agree that the speaker’s claim to “know” in Case A and his admission that he doesn’t “know” in Case B are both true; she just accepts a different account of why it is that both assertions can be, and are, true, according to which it is because in B the speaker doesn’t meet the attitude requirement for knowledge, while he does meet that requirement in A. Perhaps not at all unexpectedly, I find my proposed explanation more plausible; presumably, Nagel sees things differently. We can try to hash this out, but extremely tricky questions, and no stable enough answers, about how to understand the attitude needed for knowledge derail this attempt to decide between accounts. But no worries: Without having to first decide these issues, third-person cases provide the natural test cases to decide between the views. We can use them to decide between theories, and then go back to the first-person cases and apply what we’ve learned from the third-person cases to guide our handling of the trickier firstperson cases

Virtually all monotheistic religions profess that there is a divine being who is extremely powerful, knowledgeable, and good. The evils of this world present various challenges for such religions. The starkest challenge is directed toward views that posit a being whose power, knowledge, and goodness are not just immense, but are as great as can be: an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good being (for short, an oopg being). For it would seem that such a being would have the power, the knowledge, and the moral disposition to prevent any evil whatsoever, and from this one might readily conclude that if there were such a being, there would be no evil at all. On one version of this challenge, the coexistence of evil with a God defined in this way is claimed to be logically impossible. This has come to be called the logical problem of evil. Another is that the existence of such a God is improbable given the evils of this world, or at least that the existence of these evils significantly lowers the probability that such an oopg God exists. The concern expressed is that these evils provide good evidence against the existence of such a God. This version is known as the evidential problem of evil.

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, 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 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.”

Against Barnett (2012), I argue that the theory I advance in DeRose 2010 is best construed as one on which ‘"were"ed-up’ future-directed conditionals like ‘If the house were not to be painted, it would soon look quite shabby’ are, in ways important to how they function in deliberation, different in literal content from their ‘straightforward’ counterparts like ‘If the house is not painted, it will soon look quite shabby’. I also defend my way of classifying future-directed conditionals against an attack by Barnett by defending a standard (among philosophers) approach to the basic structure of some conditionals. Finally, I counter Barnett’s charge that by using the concept of deliberation in my account of the meaning of future-directed conditionals, I put an implausibly demanding constraint on what it takes to understand such sentences

Laat me vanaf het begin duidelijk maken welke betekenis ik wel — en niet — aan de term “universalisme” zal hechten. Zoals ik de term gebruik, heeft “universalisme” betrekking op het standpunt dat alle menselijke wezens uiteindelijk gered zullen worden en bij Christus eeuwig leven zullen mogen genieten. Dit standpunt is verenigbaar met de opvatting dat God vele mensen na hun dood zal straffen. Vele universalisten nemen aan dat er van Goddelijke vergelding sprake zal zijn, hoewel enkelen daar wellicht niet van uitgaan. Universalisme verplicht iemand wel om aan te nemen dat zo’n straf niet altoos zal voortduren. Universalisme is ook onverenigbaar met de verschillende opvattingen die leren dat sommige mensen uiteindelijk vernietigd zullen worden (na allereerst al dan niet straf te hebben ontvangen). Zulke opvattingen stemmen met het universalisme overeen in het opzicht dat de straf ook volgens hen niet altoosdurend is, maar ze verschillen van het universalisme in die zin, dat zij geloven dat het eeuwige leven sommige mensen zal worden onthouden. Enkele universalisten willen de verzoening ook op dieren betrekken, een enkeling op gevallen engelen of zelfs op de satan zelf, maar ik ben geneigd om aan te nemen dat hij uitsluitend op menselijke wezens van toepassing is. Kort samengevat: universalisme is het standpunt dat elk menselijk wezen, uiteindelijk althans, de feestzaal zal mogen binnengaan.

A few years back, I participated in the Spindell Conference in Memphis, and gave a paper, “How Can We Know That We’re Not Brains in Vats?” (available on-line at: http://pantheon.yale.edu/~kd47/Spindell.htm). The bulk of that paper concerned responses to skepticism. I pursued an unusually radical criticism of the often-criticized “Putnam-style” responses to skepticism. To put it rather enigmatically, I argued that such responses don’t work even if they work! And I compared such responses with the type of response I favor – the “contextualist Moorean” response – to show how these latter responses are of a type that avoids the radical problems that plague Putnam-style responses. But in the final section of the paper, I turned briefly to a different, though related, issue, presenting my proposed solution to what’s often called the “McKinsey problem.”.

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.

Resistance to contextualism comes in the form of many very different types of objections. My topic here is a certain group or family of related objections to contextualism that I call “Now you know it, now you don’t” objections. I responded to some such objections in my “Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions” a few years back. In what follows here, I will expand on that earlier response in various ways, and, in doing so, I will discuss some aspects of David Lewis’s recent paper, “Elusive Knowledge.”

In epistemology, “contextualism” denotes a wide variety of more-or-less closely related positions according to which the issues of knowledge or justification are somehow relative to context. I will proceed by first explicating the position I call contextualism, and distinguishing that position from some closely related positions in epistemology, some of which sometimes also go by the name of “contextualism”. I’ll then present and answer what seems to many the most pressing of the objections to contextualism as I construe it, and also indicate some of the main positive motivations for accepting the view. Among the epistemologists I’ve spoken with who have an opinion on the matter, I think it’s fair to say a majority reject contextualism. However, the resistance has to this point been largely underground, with little by way of sustained arguments against contextualism appearing in the journals,[i] though I have begun to see various papers in manuscript form which are critical of contextualism. Here, I’ll respond the criticism of contextualism that, in my travels, I have found to be the most pervasive in producing suspicion about the view.