According to DeRose 2009, intellectualism is understood as the view that ‘the factors in virtue of which a true belief amounts to knowledge are exclusively truth-relevant, in that they affect how likely it is that the belief is true, either from the point of view of the subject or from a more objective vantage point’ (p.185), in addition, ‘factors concerning what attitude toward the proposition in question the subject has’ (p.187). For example, considering the fake barns case, whether the agent, Henry, is in a fake-barn region or an ordinary rural area is relevant to the *likelihood* that Henry’s belief is true ‘from a more objective vantage point’. Such a factor matters to whether or not the subject knows.
‘How likely that the [relevant] belief is true’ seemed a bit puzzling to me because the belief is, actually speaking, true. But, since it is about the likelihood, I suppose that the view involves some counterfactual thinking. Intellectualism is about the factors that could have made the actually true belief false in some counterfactual circumstances. In many of the fake-barns worlds, Henry’s belief is false. So we can say that his belief that what he sees is a barn is more likely to be false in a fake-barn region than in a rural area. Such an objective factor (something the subject might not be aware of) is ‘truth-relevant’ in that sense.
DeRose considers contextualism about knowledge attributions to be an intellectualist position, as opposed to Stanley’s subject-sensitive invariantism, even in some or many cases they assign the same truth-values to the uses of knowledge attributions.
For the contextualist, exactly which proposition gets expressed by a knowledge-ascribing sentence will often be affected by ‘practical’ factors, but the particular proposition that does get expressed will not itself be at all about those factors: Whether that proposition is true is deterred only by the subject’s attitude and the truth-relevant factors of the subject’s situation. On SSI, by contrast, the same proposition gets expressed no matter how the practical facts are arrayed, but the truth-conditions of that proposition are such that whether they are satisfied crucially does depend on the practical, as well as on the truth-relevant, facts of the situation. (188)
Given any knowledge claim and its circumstance (including both truth-relevant and practical factors), contextualism and SSI both can assign the same truth-value to it, but how they do so diverge.
- Contextualism: claim — practical factors —> proposition that S’s true belief meets the contextually determined epistemic standards (which is true because of the t-r factors)
- SSI: claim —> proposition that S’s true belief meets the invariant standards (which is true in part due to practical factors)
Here is a different quote that present the same idea of intellectualism:
According to received tradition in analytic epistemology, whether a true belief qualifies as knowledge depends only on purely epistemic factors—factors that are appropriately ‘truth-related.’ If my true belief that p qualifies as knowledge while yours does not, this must be because of some difference in our evidence regarding p, the reliability of the processes involved in our beliefs that p, our counterfactual relations to the truth of p, and so on. My true belief cannot count as knowledge, and yours not, simply because you have more at stake than I do in whether p. Raising the stakes may indirectly affect whether on satisfies the belief condition on knowledge (Because of one’s worrying about the costs of being wrong, for example), but it cannot otherwise make a difference to whether one knows. (Fantl and McGrath 2007, 558)
Overall DeRose suggests that intellectualism is supported by two considerations:
- We have a general sense about what kind of factors are relevant to knowing something
- ‘Now you know it, now you don’t’ type sentences are very peculiar, but they should be just fine for anti-intellectualism because our practical concerns easily shift, say, over time.
With respect to (2), Hawthorne tries to account for why ‘now you know it, now you don’t’ sentences sound bad, even when they can be true on SSI. He appeals to the knowledge account of assertion, according to which one needs to know that p in order for her to assert p. If a person doesn’t now know that p, then she doesn’t know that she used to know. So she cannot assert that she used to know.
DeRose points out, however, ‘now you know it, now you don’t’ sentences are possible in the third-person form as well: ‘Smith does’t know, but he did know before the stakes were so high’, etc. The attributor has knowledge of the relevant practical circumstances of the subject over time, and she should be in a position to make such a shifting assertion about the subject.
Next I want to turn to, specifically, how contextualism handles ‘now you know …’ sentences. But before doing so, let’s first note Palle Yourgrau presented such a shifting dialogue a while ago:
A: Is that a zebra?
B: Yes, it is a zebra.
A: But can you rule out its being merely a cleverly painted mule?
B: No, I can’t.
A: So, you admit you didn’t know it was a zebra?
B: No, I did know then that it was a zebra. But after your question, I no longer know. (Yourgrau 1983, 183)
One thing to note here is that the intended reading of this dialogue is such that neither A’s evidential status nor her confidence diminishes after A’s comments. To anyone, whether the subject is justified well or confident enough is relevant to whether she counts as knowing. So if the dialogue affects such traditional intellectualist factors, then the last utterance might as well be true. I think this is an important point I wasn’t aware yesterday (3/10/2014)) when I was exposing and discussing the Japanese version of the dialogue. Some found the Japanese version just as natural as anything. That contrasts with:
When we imagine the dialogue transpiring such that A’s question does greatly diminish B’s level of confidence and/or justification … that toast line still sounds absurd. (DeRose 2009, 201)
But my Japanese rendering of the Yourgrau dialogue was misleading, I now suppose. The last line seems absurd in Japanese too.
The basic ides DeRose presents as a contextualist answer to ‘now you know…’ sentences is that the operative epistemic standards are set by the context at the time of utterance. So the last line of B above would be indeed incoherent according to contextualism. The standards functioning for the first occurrence of ‘know’ would be the same as those for the second one. The standards invoked are not those employed earlier in the conversation, just as the values of indexicals are sensitive to the context of utterance, not to any other salient time or location, even if they are mentioned. DeRose’s example is: ‘When I was in Houston last year, David was here’ (205).
Derose, K. 2009, The Case for Contextualism Vol. 1.
Fantl and McGrath, 2007, “On Pragmatic Encroachment in Epistemology” in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 75: 558-9.
Yougrau, Palle, 1983, “Knowledge and Relevant Alternatives”, Synthese 55:175-90.
和泉悠ブログ 