Realism has been a central object of attention among analytical philosophers for some decades. Starting from analytical philosophy, the return of realism has spread into other contemporary philosophical traditions and given birth to new trends in current discussions, as for example in the debates about “new realism.” Discussions about realism focused on linguistic meaning, epistemology, metaphysics, theory of action and ethics. The implications for politics of discussion about realism in action theory and in ethics, however, are not much discussed.

Philosophers on all sides of the contextualism debates have had an overly narrow conception of what semantic context sensitivity could be. They have conflated context sensitivity (dependence of truth or extension on features of context) with indexicality (dependence of content on features of context). As a result of this conflation, proponents of contextualism have taken arguments that establish only context sensitivity to establish indexicality, while opponents of contextualism have taken arguments against indexicality to be arguments against context sensitivity. Once these (...) concepts are carefully pulled apart, it becomes clear that there is conceptual space in semantic theory for nonindexical forms of contextualism that have many advantages over the usual indexical forms. (shrink)

Linguistic theories of lexical semantics support a Neoclassical Theory of concepts, where entities like CAUSE, STATE, and MANNER serve as necessary conditions for the possession of individual event concepts. Not all concepts have a neoclassical structure, and whether or not words participate in regular linguistic patterns such as verbal alternations will be proposed as a probe for identifying whether their corresponding concepts do indeed have such structure. I show how the Neoclassical Theory supplements existing theories of concepts and supports a (...) version of analyticity and conceptual analysis. (shrink)

Skeptical puzzles and arguments often employ knowledge-closure principles . Epistemologists widely believe that an adequate reply to the skeptic should explain why her reasoning is appealing albeit misleading; but it’s unclear what would explain the appeal of the skeptic’s closure principle, if not for its truth. In this paper, I aim to challenge the widespread commitment to knowledge-closure. But I proceed by first examining a new puzzle about failing to know—what I call the New Ignorance Puzzle . This puzzle resembles (...) to the Old Ignorance Puzzle , although it does not involve a closure principle. It instead centers on the standard view of ignorance, a highly intuitive principle stating that ignorance is merely a failure to know. In Sects. 2 and 3, I argue that the best way to solve the New Ignorance Puzzle is to reject the standard view of ignorance and to explain away its appeal via conversational implicature. I then use this solution to the New Ignorance Puzzle as a way of explaining why knowledge-closure principles would seem true, and why abominable conjunctions would seem abominable, even if such principles were false . The upshot is a new way of explaining why the skeptic’s reasoning is appealing albeit misleading. (shrink)

The present article proceeds from the mainstream view that the conceptual framework underpinning adversarial systems of criminal adjudication, i.e. a mixture of common-sense philosophy and probabilistic analysis, is unsustainable. In order to provide fact-finders with an operable structure of justification, we need to turn to epistemology once again. The article proceeds in three parts. First, I examine the structural features of justification and how various theories have attempted to overcome Agrippa’s trilemma. Second, I put Inferential Contextualism to the test and (...) show that a defeasible structure of justification allocating epistemic rights and duties to all participants of an inquiry manages to dissolve the problem of scepticism. Third, I show that our epistemic practice already embodies a contextualist mechanism. Our problem was not that our Standard of Proof is inoperable but that it was not adequately conceptualized. Contextualism provides the framework to articulate the abovementioned practice and to treat ‘reasonable doubts’ as a mechanism which we can now describe in detail. The seemingly insurmountable problem with our efforts to define the concept “reasonable doubts” was the fact that we have been conflating the surface features of this mechanism and its internal structure, i.e. the rules for its use. (shrink)

The present article proceeds from the mainstream view that the conceptual framework underpinning adversarial systems of criminal adjudication, i.e. a mixture of common-sense philosophy and probabilistic analysis, is unsustainable. In order to provide fact-finders with an operable structure of justification, we need to turn to epistemology once again. The article proceeds in three parts. First, I examine the structural features of justification and how various theories have attempted to overcome Agrippa’s trilemma. Second, I put Inferential Contextualism to the test and (...) show that a defeasible structure of justification allocating epistemic rights and duties to all participants of an inquiry manages to dissolve the problem of scepticism. Third, I show that our epistemic practice already embodies a contextualist mechanism. Our problem was not that our Standard of Proof is inoperable but that it was not adequately conceptualized. Contextualism provides the framework to articulate the abovementioned practice and to treat ‘reasonable doubts’ as a mechanism which we can now describe in detail. The seemingly insurmountable problem with our efforts to define the concept “reasonable doubts” was the fact that we have been conflating the surface features of this mechanism and its internal structure, i.e. the rules for its use. (shrink)

The present article proceeds from the mainstream view that the conceptual framework underpinning adversarial systems of criminal adjudication, i.e. a mixture of common-sense philosophy and probabilistic analysis, is unsustainable. In order to provide fact-finders with an operable structure of justification, we need to turn to epistemology once again. The article proceeds in three parts. First, I examine the structural features of justification and how various theories have attempted to overcome Agrippa’s trilemma. Second, I put Inferential Contextualism to the test and (...) show that a defeasible structure of justification allocating epistemic rights and duties to all participants of an inquiry manages to dissolve the problem of scepticism. Third, I show that our epistemic practice already embodies a contextualist mechanism. Our problem was not that our Standard of Proof is inoperable but that it was not adequately conceptualized. Contextualism provides the framework to articulate the abovementioned practice and to treat ‘reasonable doubts’ as a mechanism which we can now describe in detail. The seemingly insurmountable problem with our efforts to define the concept “reasonable doubts” was the fact that we have been conflating the surface features of this mechanism and its internal structure, i.e. the rules for its use. (shrink)

The present article proceeds from the mainstream view that the conceptual framework underpinning adversarial systems of criminal adjudication, i.e. a mixture of common-sense philosophy and probabilistic analysis, is unsustainable. In order to provide fact-finders with an operable structure of justification, we need to turn to epistemology once again. The article proceeds in three parts. First, I examine the structural features of justification and how various theories have attempted to overcome Agrippa’s trilemma. Second, I put Inferential Contextualism to the test and (...) show that a defeasible structure of justification allocating epistemic rights and duties to all participants of an inquiry manages to dissolve the problem of scepticism. Third, I show that our epistemic practice already embodies a contextualist mechanism. Our problem was not that our Standard of Proof is inoperable but that it was not adequately conceptualized. Contextualism provides the framework to articulate the abovementioned practice and to treat ‘reasonable doubts’ as a mechanism which we can now describe in detail. The seemingly insurmountable problem with our efforts to define the concept “reasonable doubts” was the fact that we have been conflating the surface features of this mechanism and its internal structure, i.e. the rules for its use. (shrink)

My aim in the paper will be to better understand what faultless disagreement could possibly consist in and what speakers disagree over when they faultlessly do so. To that end, I will first look at various examples of faultless disagreement. Since I will eventually claim that different forms of faultless disagreement can be modeled semantically on different forms of context-sensitivity I will, in a second step, discuss three different semantic accounts that all promise to successfully accommodate certain forms of context-sensitivity: (...) Indexical Contextualism, Nonindexcal Contextualism and Radical Relativism . Focussing on the controversy between Indexical and Nonindexical Contextualists the remainder of the paper will be devoted to the question which theory is best suited to handle what kind of disagreement. (shrink)

Both context relativists and circumstance-of-evaluation relativists agree that the traditional semantic interpretation of some sentence-types fails to deliver the adequate truth-conditions for the corresponding tokens. But while the context relativists argue that the truth-conditions of each token depend on its context of utterance—each token being thus associated with a distinct intension—circumstance-of-evaluation relativists preserve a unique intension for all the tokens by placing circumstances of evaluations under the influence of a certain ‘point of view’. The main difference between the two approaches (...) is that only the former can operate locally. It is shown that, for this reason, circumstance-of-evaluation relativism makes erroneous semantic predictions about (relative) gradable adjectives. (shrink)

Based on the brain in a vat thought experiment, skeptics argue that we cannot have certain knowledge. At the same time, we do have the intuition that we know some things with certainty. A way to justify this intuition is given by semantic contextualists who argue that the word “knows” is context sensitive. However, many have objected to the intelligibility of this claim. In response, another approach called “moderate pragmatic contextualism” was invoked, which claims that “knows” itself is not context (...) sensitive, but knowledge assertions are. I show, however, that to refute skepticism, moderate pragmatic contextualism rests on unjustified and implausible assumptions as well. Since no form of contextualism works as a response to skepticism, I argue that we should simply accept skepticism. However, I argue that skepticism is not a problem because skeptic pragmatic contextualism can offer a plausible explanation of why we have the intuition that our ordinary knowledge claims are true, even though they are not. I conclude that skeptic pragmatic contextualism offers the most plausible response to the brain in a vat thought experiment. (shrink)

Based on the brain in a vat thought experiment, skeptics argue that we cannot have certain knowledge. At the same time, we do have the intuition that we know some things with certainty. A way to justify this intuition is given by semantic contextualists who argue that the word “knows” is context sensitive. However, many have objected to the intelligibility of this claim. In response, another approach called “moderate pragmatic contextualism” was invoked, which claims that “knows” itself is not context (...) sensitive, but knowledge assertions are. I show, however, that to refute skepticism, moderate pragmatic contextualism rests on unjustified and implausible assumptions as well. Since no form of contextualism works as a response to skepticism, I argue that we should simply accept skepticism. However, I argue that skepticism is not a problem because skeptic pragmatic contextualism can offer a plausible explanation of why we have the intuition that our ordinary knowledge claims are true, even though they are not. I conclude that skeptic pragmatic contextualism offers the most plausible response to the brain in a vat thought experiment. (shrink)

Are color adjectives ("red", "green", etc.) relative adjectives or absolute adjectives? Existing theories of the meaning of color adjectives attempt to answer that question using informal ("armchair") judgments. The informal judgments of theorists conflict: it has been proposed that color adjectives are absolute with standards anchored at the minimum degree on the scale, that they are absolute but have near-midpoint standards, and that they are relative. In this paper we report two experiments, one based on entailment patterns and one based (...) on presupposition accommodation, that investigate the meaning of scalar adjectives. We find evidence confirming the existence of subgroups of the population who operate with different standards for color adjectives. The evidence of interpersonal variation in where standards are located on the relevant scale and how those standards can be adjusted indicates that the existing theories of the meaning of color adjectives are at best only partially correct. We also find evidence that paradigmatic relative adjectives ("tall", "wide") behave in ways that are not predicted by the standard theory of scalar adjectives. We discuss several different possible explanations for this unexpected behavior. We conclude by discussing the relevance of our findings for philosophical debates about the nature and extent of semantically encoded context sensitivity in which color adjectives have played a key role. (shrink)

Contextualists about knowledge ascriptions perceive an analogy between the semantics they posit for “know(s)” and the semantics of comparative terms like “tall” and “flat”. Jason Stanley has recently raised a number of objections to this view. This paper offers a response by way of an alternative analogy with modified comparatives, which resolves most of Stanley’s objections. Rather than being ad hoc, this new analogy in fact fits better with platitudes about knowledge and facilitates a better understanding of the semantics of (...) gradability, such that an explanation of most of Stanley’s disanalogies becomes available. In addition, I argue that there are reasons to doubt Stanley’s claim that “knows(s)” cannot switch its content within a discourse, due to what may happen when we ascribe knowledge of more than one proposition. (shrink)

Conversational contextualism states that the truth-conditions expressed by knowledge-attributing sentences vary relative to the context of utterance. This context is determined partly by different standards the person involved must meet in order to make the sentence true. I am concerned with the question of how these standards can be raised or lowered, and especially what happens to the standards and the conversational score when parties in a discussion push the conversational scores in different directions. None of the available options for (...) an answer seems satisfying. I argue that this results from a misunderstanding of the characteristics of the situation at hand. (shrink)

El costo de tomar una decisión sobre la base de las creencias falsas varía en diferentes contextos de acción. En algunos casos el costo del error podría ser muy alto para el bienestar de los agentes afectados y en otros casos muy bajo. El contraste entre estos dos tipos de contextos ha sido recientemente objeto de atención en la epistemología. Mi objetivo en este trabajo es extender el análisis de algunas de las implicaciones de ese contraste al campo moral. En (...) particular, defenderé la tesis de que existen casos en los que un sujeto puede saber faliblemente que un curso de acción es el mejor desde una perspectiva moral y no estar, sin embargo, justificado a actuar sobre la base de ese conocimiento en el contexto en que se encuentra, dado el elevado costo que tendría que ese juicio fuese falso. Por lo tanto, en esos casos, existiría una brecha entre los conceptos de conocimiento moral y justificación moral de la acción. (shrink)

Concessive knowledge attributions (CKAs) are knowledge attributions of the form ‘S knows p, but it’s possible that q’, where q obviously entails not-p (Rysiew, Nous (Detroit, Mich.) 35:477–514, 2001). The significance of CKAs has been widely discussed recently. It’s agreed by all that CKAs are infelicitous, at least typically. But the agreement ends there. Different writers have invoked them in their defenses of all sorts of philosophical theses; to name just a few: contextualism, invariantism, fallibilism, infallibilism, and that the knowledge (...) rules for assertion and practical reasoning are false. In fact, there is a lot of confusion about CKAs and their significance. I try to clear some of this confusion up, as well as show what their significance is with respect to the debate between fallibilists and infallibilists about knowledge in particular. (shrink)

Epistemic contextualism (‘EC’), the view that the truth-values of knowledge attributions may vary with the context of ascription, has a variety of different linguistic implementations. On one of the implementations most popular in the early days of EC, the predicate ‘knows p’ functions semantically similarly to gradable adjectives such as ‘flat’, ‘tall’, or ‘empty’. In recent work Jason Stanley and John Hawthorne have presented powerful arguments against such implementations of EC. In this article I briefly systematize the contextualist analogy to (...) gradable adjectives, present Stanley’s argument against the analogy, and offer a contextualist response that abandons the analogy in favor of modeling the semantics of ‘knows p’ along the lines of quantifier expressions. I then present Hawthorne’s objection to the views presented, and finally conclude by outlining an argument to the effect that ‘knows p’ is an automatic indexical and as such to be expected to function differently from many other indexicals that the term has been compared to in the literature. I finally point out that no analogy should be expected to be perfect, and that no harm is done by postulating some unique behavior of ‘knows p’. (shrink)

 ’ The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism has been widely read and discussed by philosophers who are interested in skepticism about our knowledge of the external world.1 Some of his later writings on the topic (such as Stroud (1989) and (1994)) are considered essential reading too. This does not, however, mean that what Stroud says about skepticism2 has as much impact on the discussion of skepticism as it deserves. It seems that his insights into the nature of skepticism have been (...) largely misunderstood or missed. Although Stroud has never argued for skepticism or claimed that skepticism is true, he has been ” ( 2001 37)  The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism is, as the title says so clearly, that skepticism is philosophically significant and should be considered seriously, but skepticism is still felt by most philosophers. (shrink)

The analysis and theorizing about concepts like “knowledge” and “justification” has played a central role in much of epistemology in the past half century. This dissertation argues for the claim that we should understand this conceptual concern as one of design. Concepts are tools and the concepts of interest to epistemologists must be those that we can best use in service of our epistemic interests. On this understanding of the conceptual project, we determine the content of epistemic concepts, not by (...) consulting our naïve linguistic intuitions, but by determining what concepts will best help us express and enforce the epistemic norms that serve our interests. The determination of what concepts will do this job best will pull on information from many empirical sources like psychology and sociology. It will also require some means of determining what our epistemic interests are. In defending this view of the methodology of epistemology, we examine how one might go about designing and thinking about the purposes of an example epistemic concept: “epistemic ought”. We also consider how thinking about things from a design prospective can help in the determination of our epistemic interests by considering how design considerations feature in the debate between scientific realism and anti-realism. We also examine and respond to a few potential problems for this methodological view from Selim Berker’s arguments against epistemic teleology to problems with the design method’s potentially problematically self-undermining or self-reinforcing character. Advisor: David Henderson. (shrink)

The philosophical path that I propose finds its origin in a properly metaethical questioning. It was first of all a question about the meaning of our moral statements by considering a defense of some kind of moral realism according to which our moral judgments would refer to a “moral reality” which would make it possible to determine their truth or their falsity. However, the realistic interpretation of moral judgments poses many difficulties from a psychological, an ontological and an epistemological point (...) of view. The central idea of this thesis was to explore these difficulties in order to consider the possibility of defending a form of moral realism. Nevertheless, this exploration – which constitutes the first part of this work – led me to a dead end in which all metaethical positions appeared to me as interesting as they were unsatisfactory. Faced with this situation, a new problem emerged to me as central: the disagreement between epistemic peers in philosophy. Since all metaethical positions are, even today, defended by experts in the field, it seemed to me essential to treat this difficulty with the intuition that a skeptical solution would be necessary. But this first turnaround was also unsatisfying, and rather than a skeptical conclusion it led me to shift my questioning to philosophy itself: what is philosophy? what can we expect from it? Perhaps my conception of philosophy – a search for truth based on argumentation – was at the origin of these successive dissatisfactions. I thus explore, in the last chapter, another way of approaching philosophy. Maybe it's not about looking for solutions to problems, like in science, maybe it’s about dealing with individual embarrassments which, at best, could just disappear. Thus “success” in philosophy would only be its abandonment – as an individual practice, and not as a discipline – through the disappearance of our philosophical embarrassments. In the end, I must admit that I do not have the means to defend such a conception of philosophy, but I can only note that all this work on moral realism, disagreement and philosophy was, for me, a way to make my philosophical embarrassment disappear. This is how, far from its starting point, the philosophical path that was mine ended. (shrink)

I discuss three understandings of the idea of “Knowledge First Epistemology”, i.e. Timothy Williamson’s suggestion that we should take knowledge as a starting point, rather than trying to analyze it. Some have taken this to be a suggestion about the role of the concept of knowledge, but Williamson also seems to be concerned with intuition-based metaphysics. As an alternative, I develop the idea that knowledge may be a social kind that can be understood through a functional analysis in the tradition (...) of Edward Craig. (shrink)

We propose a framework that makes space for both non-indexical contextualism and assessment-sensitivity. Such pluralism is motivated by considering possible variance in judgments about retraction. We conclude that the proposed pluralism, instead of problematizing, vindicates defining truth of a proposition w.r.t. a context of utterance and a context of assessment. To implement this formally, we formalize initialization of parameters by contexts. Then, a given parameter, depending on a speaker's judgment, can get initialized by either the context of utterance or the (...) context of assessment. An upshot of the proposal is that one need not exclusively espouse one of non-indexical contextualism or assessment-sensitivity about a particular class of expressions, for instance predicates of personal taste, in language; one can be pluralist in this sense. (This manuscript is part of an ongoing research project). (shrink)

§§3-4 of the Begriffsschrift present Frege’s objections to a dominant if murky nineteenth-century semantic picture. I sketch a minimalist variant of the pre-Fregean picture which escapes Frege’s criticisms by positing a thin notion of semantic content which then interacts with a multiplicity of kinds of truth to account for phenomena such as modality. After exploring several ways in which we can understand the existence of multiple truth properties, I discuss the roles of pointwise and setwise truth properties in modal logic. (...) I argue that thinking of supertruth and determinate truth as setwise truth properties allows an understanding of supervaluationist approaches to vagueness which escapes both Williamson’s objections to and a needless metalinguistic orientation of traditional supervaluationism. (shrink)

Knowledge is important for us, human beings, for a variety of reasons, starting with trivial but necessary reasons to live your life. Western man also has a collective project that is constitutive of its culture: science; and the aim of science is to gather knowledge about the world in its broadest meaning: from the origin of a particular disease to the origin of man, life, planet Earth and the universe, from why the orbits move as they do to why a (...) mass of people behaves differently from individuals, from why the sky is blue to why the sea is salty, from why the climate seems to change to why rainbows appear, etc. etc. The quest to understand what knowledge is, is as old as philosophy itself, and the philosophy o. (shrink)

Much of the extant discussion focuses on the question of whether contextualism resolves skeptical paradoxes. Understandably. Yet there has been less discussion as to the internal structure of contextualist theories. Regrettably. Here, for instance, are two questions that could stand further discussion: (i) what is the linguistic basis for contextualism and (ii) what is the parameter that shifts with context?