Michael Blome-Tillmann

Knowledge and Presuppositions

The paper explicates a new way to model the context-sensitivity of ‘knows’, viz. a way that suggests a close connection between the content of ‘knows’ in a context C and what is pragmatically presupposed in C. After explicating my new approach in the first half of the paper and arguing that it is explanatorily superior to standard accounts of epistemic contextualism, the paper points, in its second half, to some interesting new features of the emerging account, such as its compatibility with the intuitions of Moorean dogmatists. Finally, the paper shows that the account defended is not subject to the most prominent and familiar philosophical objections to epistemic contextualism discussed in the recent literature.

Knowledge and implicatures

In recent work on the semantics of ‘knowledge’-attributions, a variety of accounts have been proposed that aim to explain the data about speaker intuitions in familiar cases such as DeRose’s Bank Case or Cohen’s Airport Case by means of pragmatic mechanisms, notably Gricean implicatures. This paper argues that pragmatic explanations of the data regarding ‘knowledge’-attributions are unsuccessful and concludes that in explaining those data we have to resort to accounts that (a) take those data at their semantic face value (Epistemic Contextualism, Subject-Sensitive Invariantism or Epistemic Relativism), or (b) reject them on psychological grounds (Moderate Insensitive Invariantism). To establish this conclusion, the paper relies solely upon widely accepted assumptions about pragmatic theory, broadly construed, and on the Stalnakerian insight that linguistic communication takes place against the backdrop of a set of mutually accepted propositions: a conversation’s common ground.

Ignorance and Epistemic Contextualism

In this paper I shall take ignorance with respect to p to consist in the absence of knowledge whether p. If you don’t know whether p—that is, if you neither know that p nor that ¬p, then you are ignorant as to whether p. The notion of ignorance can, in other words, be reduced to the notion of knowledge. Scepticism in epistemology is the view that we are ignorant about the external world. According to the sceptic, this ignorance is universal and ubiquitous. Prima facie convincing arguments have been produced in support of scepticism and a lively philosophical debate has emerged ever since Descartes introduced such an argument in his Meditations. This chapter will consider one such argument for our ignorance about the external world and outline how Epistemic Contextualism—a contemporary view about the semantics of ‘knowledge’-attributions—aims to resolve the threat posed by the argument. To begin our discussion consider the following argument: