DeRose on Lotteries

This article discusses Keith DeRose’s treatment of the lottery problem in Chapter 5 of his recent The Appearance of Ignorance. I agree with a lot of it but also raise some critical points and questions and make some friendly proposals. I discuss different ways to set up the problem, go into the difference (quite relevant here) between knowing and ending inquiry, propose to distinguish between two different kinds of lotteries, add to the defense of the idea that one can know lottery propositions, give a critical discussion of DeRose’s contextualist solution to the problem, and support his defense against an absurdity objection with additional arguments.

Error theory: How we came to be bamboozled by our own words?

The conversational contextualist is frequently faced with objections which aim to show that her anti-skeptical argument founded on an ?error theory? portrays a picture of the actual linguistic practice which is unsustainable. In this article, the author strives to ascertain what is the validity and argumentative power of these objections. The first part of the text illustrates the key points on which the contextualist solution of the sceptical problem is assessed as appealing, while the second part cites multiple reasons to doubt its credibility, given that it incorporates an ?error theory?. Given the reconstruction of objections to the ?error theory?, some of which we do not yet have an answer to, the author closes with the insight that there is sufficient grounds to conclude that the appeal of the conversational contextualist approach to problems of knowledge is, to a large extent, and on multiple grounds, reduced.

Paradoxes of Freedom II

Chapter 4 examines David Lewis’s contextualist solution to the grandfather paradox. Section 1 introduces the basic elements of Lewis’s view and explains how they are supposed to help solve the various paradoxes of freedom. Section 2 examines a famous objection to Lewis’s view that is put forward by Kadri Vihvelin. Section 3 addresses a very different kind of worry, due to Paul Horwich. (According to Horwich, grandfather-style paradoxes do not show that time travel is impossible, but they do give us reason to think it is unlikely.) Section 4 then concludes by surveying various “mechanical” paradoxes in which self-defeating acts seem to arise without any operation of free will.

On the Standards-Variantist Solution to Skepticism

The skeptical puzzle consists of three independently plausible yet jointly inconsistent claims: (A) S knows a certain ordinary proposition op; (B) S does not know the denial of a certain skeptical hypothesis sh; and (C) S knows that op only if S knows that not-sh. The variantist solution (to the skeptical puzzle) claims that (A) and not-(B) are true in the ordinary context, but false in the skeptical one. Epistemic contextualism has offered a standards-variantist solution, which is the most prominent variantist solution on the market. In this paper, I argue that the standards-variantist solution in general (and the contextualist solution in particular) is epistemically uninteresting. Proponents of the variantist solution should opt for the position-variantist solution instead. I will discuss some important implications of my findings.

Williams’ contextualist solution to the skeptical paradox

At the beginning of this paper a formulation of skeptical paradox is offered. Subsequently, possible types of anti-skeptical answers to this paradox are shown. Special attention is paid to the determination of the contextualistic versus other anti-skeptical answers. Two versions of contextualism are then presented, in order to more accurately determine Williams' contextualist view by their comparative analysis. Presentation of this view is supplemented by the display of Williams' understanding of knowledge in nonepistemological contexts. In the end, two objections to the Williams' contextualist view are exposed, and the answers to them are offered.

Epistemic Disagreements: A Solution for Contextualists

My paper aims to account for the possibility of disagreements concerning what we know; for clearly, people disagree about what they know. More precisely, my goal is to explain how a contextualist theory of knowledge attributions can explain the existence of disagreement among speakers. My working hypothesis is that genuine epistemic disagreement is possible only under the assumption that the meaning of the word “knowledge” is governed by contexts that are objective, in the sense that that the content of the word “knowledge” is fixed for all speakers sharing a common conversational goal. The paper is divided into two sections. In the first section, I explain why current versions of epistemic contextualism cannot account for epistemic disagreement. In the second section, following Christopher Gauker’s theory of linguistic communication, I offer my own contextualist solution to the problem of epistemic disagreement.

A Contextualist Solution to the Gettier Problem

According to the deontological view on justification, being justified in believing some proposition is a matter of having done one's epistemic duty with respect to that proposition. The present paper argues that, given a proper articulation of the deontological view, it is defensible that knowledge is justified true belief, virtually all epistemologists since Gettier. One important claim to be argued for is that once it is appreciated that it depends on contextual factors whether a person has done her epistemic duty with respect to a given proposition, many so-called Gettier cases, which are supposed to be cases of justified true belief that are not cases of knowledge, will be seen to be not really cases of justified belief after all. A second important claim is that the remaining alleged Gettier cases can be qualified as cases of knowledge. This requires that we countenance a notion of epistemic luck, but the requisite kind of luck is of a quite benign nature.

A Contextualist Solution to the Problem of Easy Knowledge

Many philosophers hold some verion of the doctrine of "basic knowledge". According to this doctrine, it's possible for S to know that p, even if S doesn't know the source of her knowledge that p to be reliable or trustworthy. Stewart Cohen has recently argued that this doctrine confronts the problem of easy knowledge. I defend basic knowledge against this criticism, by providing a contextualist solution to the problem of easy knowledge.