Was Emily Brown American Empress in Korea?

This paper investigates the limits and meaning of historical inquiry in light of inferential contextualism that holds as its central tenet that the epistemic status of a proposition depends on the context of the subject. Historical inquiry, the discussion will show, is an epistemic practice that operates under the reliabilist presupposition that beliefs formed through the processes, whose pragmatic utility has been already proven in problem solving situations, may be taken to be rationally justified. As for the limits of historical inquiry, it will be pointed out that the practice is unable to achieve independent criteria for determining if the belief it produces correctly reflects the thing in reality it purports to be about and thus correspondence between the former and the latter cannot be established. Furthermore, beliefs formed by historical inquiry cannot be rendered verifiable even through a future-oriented pragmatic theory of truth because it inquires into what happened in the past, not what is to happen in the future. Despite the fact that we cannot tell the truth about the past in any certain and direct way, it is, the paper will conclude, still epistemically meaningful to distinguish justified from unjustified beliefs in history because historical inquiry is so closely connected with everyday epistemic practice through sharing pragmatically sustained processes that the former cannot be discarded without giving up the principles of the latter. There lies the meaning of historical inquiry.

Epistemic contextualism

The aim of this article is to provide an introduction to the main topic of this issue of Theoria. First, the author presents the key thesis of epistemic contextualism, outlines its development in contemporary epistemology and briefly characterizes its two versions, namely conversational and inferential contextualism. Second, the author focuses on some contextualist solutions to three major epistemological problems: the problem of scepticism, lottery, and Gettier's problem. The author agrees with Stewart Cohen that Gettier?s problem does not belong to this group and explains why both its formulation and a solution require a traditional, invariantist approach.

Inferential contextualism as an epistemic anti-skeptical strategy

This paper analyzes the advantages inferential contextualism has over the other contextualist theories in epistemology. Inferential contextualism is labelled as an epistemic anti-skeptical strategy, contrary to the semantic strategies that are also inspired by the Wittgenstein?s book On Certainty. It is claimed that there are certain internal incoherencies within the epistemic strategies, which gives an advantage to the semantic ones, both in the argumentation against skepticism and as an interpretation of Wittgenstein.

How (not) to be a fallibilist: Lottery paradox and two types of epistemic contextualism

There is one common thing among lotteries from all over the world: there is small number of winning tickets and considerably bigger number of losing tickets. Therefore, the probability that a ticket wins a lottery is quite low, usually so low that we think that it is almost sure the ticket loses. But, we would never say that we know that a ticket will lose, until we see results of the lottery in, for example, some newspapers. And the probability of newspapers making a mistake does not seem to affect our knowledge claims. But why is that, since newspapers could make a mistake more often than a ticket wins? This question presents trouble for fallibilism, which claim that S could know that p, even when the probability that p is less than 1. Contextualist theories give their typical brand of solution: we have a change of context between the two cases, and in one case standard for knowledge claims are higher than the standard in the other case. Because of that, one can know that S lost the lottery when she reads it in newspapers. In this paper, I will present analysis of the lottery paradox, and two types of epistemic contexutalism: simple conversational contextualism and inferential contextualism. I will also present two of the most popular solution based on simple conversational contextualism, made by Lewis and Cohen. Finally, I will introduce some problems for such solutions, and show that the problems could solved if we apply strategy and explanation of inferential contextualism, type of contextualism proposed by Michael Williams.

Williams’ inferential contextualism

This paper is concerned with version of epistemic contextualism known as inferential contextualism which cheif proponent is Michael Williams. The general contextualist strategy attempts to interpret the cognitive claims as expressing statements which meaning is sensitive to the context in which they are uttered, which implies that the truth-value of these claims may differ from context to context. Versions of epistemic contextualism that explain context sensitivity of cognitive claims by referring to conversational factors of the participants in the given conversational context are usually called simple conversational contextualism. Williams accepts the basic contextualists assumptions, but, in contrast to simple conversational contextualists, insists that explanation of contextual sensitivity of cognitive statements is to be found in differences (which are mainly the differences in the methodological assumptions and inferential patterns) between the thematic areas which are the subject of knowledge in different contexts. We will try to show that Williams? contextualism, despite some difficulties, does have certain advantages over the simple conversational contextualism.