Certain Doubts

to CD’s own Matt Weiner, whose paper, “Must We Know What We Say?” (draft, in pdf format, available here), has been accepted by my favorite journal, The Philosophical Review. This is almost month-old news, but I just recently heard. So while I’m issuing somewhat belated congratulations to Matt, I’ll mention as well that Matt has landed at tenure-track job at Texas Tech. So watch out Lubbock TX: If Matt’s new students take his teachings to heart, you may soon have a lot of folks going around town saying things that they don’t know to be so!

The Philosophical Quarterly has a special issue (April 2005) on Contextualism that has just hit the shelves (at least here at the Yale library). Contents:

-Michael Brady & Duncan Pritchard: “Epistemological Contextualism: Problems and Prospects,” pp. 161-171
-Keith DeRose: “The Ordinary Language Basis for Contextualism and the New Invariantism,” pp. 172-198
-Stewart Cohen: “Knowledge, Speaker, and Subject,” pp. 199-212
-Timothy Williamson: “Contextualism, Subject-Sensitive Invariantism and Knowledge of Knowledge,” pp. 213-235
-Crispin Wright: “Contextualism and Scepticism: Even-Handedness, Factivity and Surreptitiously Raising Standards,” pp. 236-262
-Jessica Brown: “Adapt or Die: the Death of Invariantism?”, pp. 263-285
-Charles Travis: “A Sense of Occasion,” pp. 286-314
DISCUSSSIONS
-Anthony Brueckner: “Contextualism, Hawthorne’s Invariantism and Third-Person Cases,” 315-318
-Jessica Brown: “Williamson on Luminosity and Contextualism,” pp. 319-327
-Tim Black: “Classic Invariantism, Relevance and Warranted Assertability Manoeuvres,” pp. 328-336
-Alan Millar: “Travis’ Sense of Occasion,” pp. 337-342

In addition, the Book Reviews for issue contains Adam Morton’s review of John Hawthorne’s Knowledge and Lotteries — which of course is also of interest to those who work on the topic.

This follows a couple of recent special big double-issues of other journals on the topic of contextualism:
-Erkenntnis, Vol. 61, Nos. 2-3, November 2004
-Philosophical Studies, vol. 119, Nos. 1-2, May 2004

All of this may constitute a bit of an overdose on the topic?

There’s a way of understanding the relevant alternatives theory of knowledge that makes infallibilism its ancestor. To get this result, play the “all-or-nothing” game with the skeptic so that the skeptic gets everything s/he wants if (and only if) s/he wins the game. Then, to rule out everything the skeptic will use to challenge any knowledge claim, one will have to have evidence that guarantees that anything incompatible with a given belief is false.

If one doesn’t wish to play this game with the skeptic, there are two weaker stances to take.

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A note from Bryan Frances that might interest some here:

Specialist in Mind-Epistemology-Language wanted at Leeds; contact Bryan Frances at b.frances@leeds.ac.uk.

Bryan assures me that even though the ad specifies philosophy of mind, that’s a bit misleading. He says, “Although the job advertisement asks for a specialty in Mind, this is misleading, as all we want is someone who can teach MA courses in either Mind or Epistemology and who is top-notch in either Mind, Epistemology, or Language.”

A question about the literature on closure principles, either for knowledge or justification. The usual story seems to be that denials of closure are first found in Dretske’s “Epistemic Operators” from 1970. Anyone know of earlier denials?

A triumph of AI has just made CS research papers a snap to write and a pleasure to read. Wow your friends! Impress your Dean! Become a Scientist, Today!

Linked to in the sidebar under Work in Progress is Ram’s new paper Undermining the Case for Contrastivism. Check it out!

One characterization of what happens with specialization in philosophy is that the strategy becomes that of collecting patches for an idea, and that certainly characterizes Plantinga’s theory of warrant. In my view, the sequence of patches reveals something important (i.e., defective) about the theory.

In brief, Plantinga begins by identifying warrant with whatever closes the gap between true belief and knowledge. This approach allows Plantinga to use examples that drive development of the theory in terms of whether those examples are examples of knowledge. All one needs to do is to say this: suppose the belief in question were true–would the person in question have knowledge?

When reading Plantinga’s theory from the point of view of thinking of warrant as whatever turns true belief into knowledge, I find myself allowing some of these steps where I wouldn’t allow them if I were thinking more in terms of the kinds of normative evaluations we intuitively make about beliefs: intuitive normative notions including warranted belief but also responsible belief, justified belief, reasonable belief, etc. But given the methodology, it would be a mistake to approach Plantinga’s theory in this way. Instead, I find myself being at least somewhat sympathetic with the following steps: identify warrant with proper function, require a design plan for things that function properly, and then build in both truth-conduciveness into the design plan and a friendly environment as conditions for warrant.

But here come the patches.

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Matt W. notes the perplexity over at TAR caused by the following remark of Williamson’s:

Knowledge is the norm of belief: a flat-out belief is fully justified if and only if it constitutes knowledge.

The perplexity is caused by reading his use of the language of justification in terms of that notion typically employed in the attempt to analyze knowledge. I don’t think this is what Williamson is saying, and the following passage from Knowledge and Its Limits (pp. 255-6) makes clear how to understand the remark above:

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Brian Weatherson had a couple of posts critical of Williamson last week at his blog. While I’m sympathetic to what I think Brian’s general point is, I’m not sure I agree with the claims in this post. The dispute is a question more of what’s accepted than what’s right, so I’d like to canvas your opinions on the question.

Brian notes that Williamson argues that Gettier refuted the justified true belief analysis of knowledge, and that he also claims that “a flat-out belief is fully justified if and only if it constitutes knowledge.” But if the second is true, justified true belief is knowledge (and vice versa). Brian continues:

From the article it looks like the way to resolve the apparent contradiction is that Williamson thinks that the Gettier cases only work if we interpret ‘justified’ as ‘justified by the best version of internalist epistemology’. He doesn’t think that there are counterexamples to an externalist version of JTB. I don’t think this is particularly plausible. The intuitions supporting Gettier cases don’t turn on whether we’re internalists or externalists about justification.

I ask: Do you agree with the last sentence? I don’t, because of these historical points:

(1) Gettier’s own cases were, I take it, directed at internalist versions of JTB–is this generally accepted?
(2) Gettier cases have been used to support externalist versions of JTB; for instance, as I read Goldman, he uses the Ginet fake barn cases to support reliabilist JTB (the theory of knowledge he puts forth in “Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge” is a JTB theory on the theory of justification he puts forth in “What is Justified Belief?”–if I’m remembering correctly.)

Some externalist versions of JTB are vulnerable to Gettier counterexamples, but it’s not clear to me that every externalist version of JTB is vulnerable. But I’m curious if others share my sense that Gettier cases are particularly suited to internalist theories.