Error possibility, contextualism, and bias

Synthese 198 (3):2413-2426 (2019)
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Abstract

A central theoretical motivation for epistemic contextualism is that it can explain something that invariantism cannot. Specifically, contextualism claims that judgments about “knowledge” are sensitive to the salience of error possibilities and that this is explained by the fact that salience shifts the evidential standard required to truthfully say someone “knows” something when those possibilities are made salient. This paper presents evidence that undermines this theoretical motivation for epistemic contextualism. Specifically, it demonstrates that while error salience does sometimes impact “knowledge” judgments as contextualism predicts, it does so in ways that are consistent with invariantism and does not require positing any additional contextualist semantics to explain. These results advance our understanding of the pathways by which error possibility affects “knowledge” judgments, answer a major challenge to invariantism, and suggest several methodological improvements for the study of knowledge attribution.

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Wesley Buckwalter
George Mason University

References found in this work

Knowledge and lotteries.John Hawthorne - 2004 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Elusive knowledge.David K. Lewis - 1996 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (4):549 – 567.
Ignorance: A Case for Scepticism.Peter K. Unger - 1975 - Oxford [Eng.]: Oxford University Press.
Knowledge and Lotteries.John Hawthorne - 2005 - Philosophical Quarterly 55 (219):353-356.
Contextualism and knowledge attributions.Keith DeRose - 1992 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (4):913-929.

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