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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
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    Perspectives
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    42
    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Knowledge-attributions are context-sensitive

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    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 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 for 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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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 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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