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    Knowledge-attributions are context-sensitive — Carmelics
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    Knowledge-attributions are context-sensitive

    Philosophy of LanguageTruth & Knowledge
    ?Rate how convincing each reason is below to see the overall strength.
    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.Explanatory talk is generally context-sensitive
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    • 2.Knowledge-talk is a species of explanatory talk
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    • 3.Therefore knowledge-talk inherits the context-sensitivity of explanatory talk
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Knowledge is a factive mental state whose truth-conditions are fixed by objective facts about belief, truth, and justification, not conversational context.
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    • 2.If 'S knows that p' were context-sensitive, then two speakers using it in different contexts to describe the same epistemic situation could both speak truly while contradicting each other, which is semantically incoherent.
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    • 3.Timothy Williamson's knowledge-first epistemology establishes knowledge as a primitive, context-invariant mental state that grounds rather than inherits contextual variation.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.The inference from 'explanatory talk is context-sensitive' to 'knowledge-talk is context-sensitive' commits a fallacy of division, since a genus having a property does not entail every species inherits it.
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    • 2.Knowledge-attributions, unlike paradigm cases of context-sensitive terms such as 'tall' or 'here,' lack the characteristic semantic features of indexicals or gradable adjectives that linguistically ground context-sensitivity.
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    • 3.The intuitions driving contextualism are better explained by pragmatic mechanisms like Gricean implicature operating on invariant semantic content, as Hawthorne and Stanley argue in the invariantist literature.
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    Topics

    Philosophy of LanguageTruth & Knowledge

    Key Terms

    knowledge(Distinguished from mere true belief, which may be the product of indoctrination and need not exercise deliberative capacities.)
    Justified true belief — true belief that has been arrived at through the exercise of deliberative capacities, including comparison of and deliberation among alternatives.

    Related

    Explanatory talk is generally context-sensitiveIf 'S knows that p' were context-sensitive, then two speakers using it in differ...Knowledge is a factive mental state whose truth-conditions are fixed by objectiv...Knowledge-attributions, unlike paradigm cases of context-sensitive terms such as...
    +5 moreShow less
    Knowledge-talk is a species of explanatory talkThe inference from 'explanatory talk is context-sensitive' to 'knowledge-talk is...The intuitions driving contextualism are better explained by pragmatic mechanism...Therefore knowledge-talk inherits the context-sensitivity of explanatory talkTimothy Williamson's knowledge-first epistemology establishes knowledge as a pri...

    Similar

    Explanatory talk is context-sensitive, which affects how we understand...82%Psychological attributions are only appropriate for entities that qual...78%Many expressions traditionally taken to be context-sensitive—such as q...76%Explanatory talk is generally context-sensitive75%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: epistemology-virtue
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    If explanatory talk is generally context-sensitive, and knowledge-talk is just a species of explanatory-talk, then perhaps knowledge-attributions are too. By changing what seems normal or by changing our interests and purpose, we might go from a context where saying “S believes the truth because of her virtue” expresses a truth, to a context where uttering the same words expresses a falsehood. And since saying “S knows” is tantamount to saying “S believes the truth because of her virtue”, it fol
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit