WHAT EXPLAINS OUR INTUITIONS ABOUT KNOWLEDGE ASCRIPTIONS?

Author: Halliday, Daniel

Source: Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 105, Number 3, May 2005 , pp. 393-402(10)

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Abstract:

Epistemological contextualism is often defended by appealing to the context sensitivity of our intuitions about knowledge ascriptions. A popular invariantist response is to explain this feature by an appeal to pragmatic implicature. In this paper I argue that this rejoinder faces a hitherto underestimated problem relating to the fact that such supposed implicatures do not appear cancellable, contrary to what we should expect. I defend contextualism by demonstrating that the current invariantist explanation of this lack of cancellability is unsuccessful, owing to a failure to appreciate the diversity of circumstances in which knowledge ascriptions may be used.

Document Type: Research article

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9264.2005.00182.x

Affiliations: 1: Department of Philosophy, University of Sheffield, Arts Tower, Western Bank, S10 2TN, daniel_halliday@hotmail.com, Email: pip03dkh@sheffield.ac.uk

Publication date: 2005-05-01