[All the papers I'm about to mention are available on-line in one form or another here.]
This is not primarily a piece of self-promotion intended to get more people to read more of my work — though of course I’d be happy if it had that effect. No, it’s a piece of self-promotion intended to get folks who do want to read what I have to say about the case for contextualism to read the right things. It seems that many read (& assign) rather stale, old papers that have since been surpassed.
(I guess I have no right to be upset that people read the wrong things: If folks went to the on-line bibliography on contextualism that I myself put on the web, and read what I’ve designated as the “Main Works,” one paper they’d be directed to is one of my old ones. I have to update that page. I’ve been putting new stuff at the top of the page, but haven’t integrated anything from the last couple of years into the “Main Works.”)
I’m not talking here about the application of contextualism to skepticism. On that, people tend to read & assign the right work of mine: “Solving the Skeptical Problem,” Philosophical Review, 1995. Yes, that’s more than a decade old now, and I have more recent papers that advance the discussion in various ways. And, in fact, I really would like it if more folks would read those more recent papers — especially if it might head off some old criticisms that seem always to get repeated. In particular, if you’re at all inclined to mistakenly characterize the account of knowledge I use as a somewhat modified version of Nozick’s account (in fact, mine is what nowadays is called a “safety” account), to think my solution is shot down by the counter-examples to sensitivity accounts of knowledge, or to protest that the philosophy of language I bring to bear on the problem isn’t relevant to the epistemological problem of skepticism (”The real problem here concerns whether we can know things; not whether we can ever truthfully make claims of the form ‘I know that P’!”), you should read “Sosa, Safety, Sensitivity, and Skeptical Hypotheses.” And if you think the contextualist’s verdict on a debate between a skeptic (”You don’t know!”) and a Commonsense opponent of hers (”Oh yes I do!”) is that both are speaking the truth, and especially if you’re bothered by that verdict, you should read “Single Scoreboard Semantics.” But if you’re going to read just one thing on the application of contextualism to skepticism, “Solving the Skeptical Problem” is the right choice. (And I should add that while I’ve further defended and elaborated on my solution since SSP, for better or for worse, I don’t think I’ve changed my mind about anything significant in SSP.)
What I am talking about the defense of contextualism itself. On that, too many people seem to read and/or assign “Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions” (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 1992) and/or “Contextualism: An Explanation and Defense” (Blackwell Guide to Epistomology, 1999). I’ll put a few words about these papers below the fold, since there are parts of them that might still be useful in various ways. But the newer and better things to read are the following three papers.
“The Ordinary Language Basis for Contextualism and the New Invariantism,” Philosophical Quarterly, 2005. The basic argument for contextualism comes from how “know” gets used in ordinary language. This basic argument was [discussed (for those with low standards) / hinted at (for those with high)] in a very preliminary way in my old 1992 paper, CKA, but is given a much better treatment here: I describe what types of cases the contextualist appeals to, and why the contextualist is on such solid ground in putting forward the premises that drive the basic argument: that the positive claim of “knowledge” in the contextualist’s low-standards case and the denial of “knowledge” in the high-standards case are both true. Along the way, I argue against “Subject-Sensitive Invariantism,” an alternative to contextualism that’s been getting a lot of attention lately. If you haven’t read this paper (or heard an accurate account of its contents from someone who has), you just don’t understand what I base my contextualism on. (Incidentally, I’ve recently heard that this paper has been chosen by PQ as one of as one of 10 highlights of their past ten volumes, and, as such, it will soon be available even to non-subscribers free online from the Blackwells Synergy site for some yet-to-be-determined period.)
“Assertion, Knowledge, and Context,” Philosophical Review, 2002. This paper marries contextualism to the knowledge account of assertion, using each to support/defend the other. This paper also plays a role in what I called above the “basic argument” for contextualism. An old worry about that basic argument (mentioned, but not answered, already in my old 1992 paper) is that what the contextualist takes to be varying truth-conditions for knowledge attributions are in fact only varying warranted-assertability-conditions. While I do much to battle that worry in other work, it takes the knowledge account of assertion to make the most definitive case against it, so that part of the basic argument is executed here in AKC. Also, in part 2 of AKC, I give another positive argument for contextualism — this one utilizing the knowledge account of assertion as a key premise.
“’Bamboozled by Our Own Words’: Semantic Blindness and Some Objections to Contextualism,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, forthcoming. This paper answers several objections to contextualism, including objections voiced by Stephen Schiffer and John Hawthorne.
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