Patrick Rysiew

The Context-Sensitivity of Knowledge Attributions

othis view strikes many as implausible, 7 it does seem to square with the relevant data. Thus, e.g., in terms of the Bank Case, it’s DeRose’s contention that most of us will find both of the following claims compelling: ~1! when I claim to know that the bank will be open on Saturday in Case A, I am saying something true;~2! I am also saying something true in Case B when I concede that I don’t know that the bank will be open on Saturday. Granted, “I seem to be in no better position to know in Case A than in Case B” ~DeRose 1992, p. 914!. Still, DeRose thinks, one can perfectly consistently maintain both ~1! and~2!: @I#n Bank Case B...when, in the face of my wife’s doubt, I admit that I don’t know that the bank will be open on Saturday, I don’t contradict an earlier claim to know that I might have made before the doubt was raised and before the issue was so important because, in an important sense, I don’t mean the same thing by “know” as I meant in the earlier claim. ~Ibid., p. 921; italics added ! According to DeRose, then, the meaning of “know ~s!” varies with certain features of the context in which it is used in making knowledge attributions. And so too for Cohen; for while there are important differences between the views of Cohen and DeRose ~more on this presently !, both believe that context enters into epistemology in virtue of the contribution it makes to the meanings of key epistemic terms, and thus in virtue of the role it plays in the determination of the conditions to be satisfied by knowledge-attributing sentences. So, according to the contextualist, knowledge attributions are context-sensitive because context affects what knowledge-attributing sentences literally express . While it promises to account for “what we want to say” with regard ~e.g.! to the Bank Case, contextualists make much of the fact that their view provides what is alleged to be a novel and quite plausible resolution of sceptical puzzles~DeRose 1992, 1995; Cohen 1988; Lewis 1979, 1996; Unger 1986 !. Taking his cue from Cohen~1988, pp. 93–94 ! the sceptical argument DeRose ~1995! focuses on is the following: ~SA! P1. I don’t know that I’m not a BIV@that is, a bodiless brain in a vat being electrochemically stimulated to have just those sensory experiences I’m having #. P2. If I don’t know that I’m not a BIV, then I don’t know that I have hands. So, C. I don’t know that I have hands. Of course, unlike the Bank Case, SA isn’t an example of merely pedestrian knowledge attributions. The basic strategy of the contextualist, however, is the same with respect to both sorts of case. In particular, it is the contextualist’s 480 NOÛS

Reid and Epistemic Naturalism

Central to the contemporary dispute over ‘naturalizing epistemology’ is the question of the continuity of epistemology with science, i.e., how far purely descriptive, psychological matters can or should inform the traditional evaluative epistemological enterprise. Thus all parties tend to agree that the distinction between psychology and epistemology corresponds to a firm fact/value distinction. This is something Reid denies with respect to the first principles of common sense: while insisting on the continuity of epistemology with the rest of science, he does not wish to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’, nor to reduce the epistemological to the psychological. His view is that the first principles are constitutive principles, hence that they are simultaneously descriptive and prescriptive, and thus that with regard to them there is in this sense simply no fact/value gap to be bridged.

A study in the cognition of individuals’ identity: Solving the problem of singular cognition in object and agent tracking

This article compares the ability to track individuals lacking mental states with the ability to track intentional agents. It explains why reference to individuals raises the problem of explaining how cognitive agents track unique individuals and in what sense reference is based on procedures of perceptual-motor and epistemic tracking. We suggest applying the notion of singular-files from theories in perception and semantics to the problem of tracking intentional agents. In order to elucidate the nature of agent-files, three views of the relation between object- and agent-tracking are distinguished: the Independence, Deflationary and Organism-Dependence Views. The correct view is argued to be the latter, which states that perceptual and epistemic tracking of a unique human organism requires tracking both its spatio-temporal object-properties and its agent-properties.

Testimony, simulation, and the limits of inductivism

TESTIMONY, SIMULATION, AND THE LIMITS OF INDUCTIVISM Patrick Rysiew According to such theorists as Reid [18], Austin [2], Coady [4], and Burge [3], the justificatory basis of beliefs based on testimony is somehow basic or sui generis. Obviously, this position contrasts with the view that testimonial justification can be reduced to justification of some more basic kind. Thus, e.g., it conflicts with what we might call ‘piecemeal inductivism’, the view of testimonial justification that Hume sets out in his Enquiry: The reason why we place any credit in witnesses and historians, is not derived from any connexion, which we perceive a priori, between testimony and reality, but because we are accustomed to find a conformity between them. [10, p. 113; cf. p. 111] As an attempt to ground what we take to be the justifiedness of our testimonial beliefs, however, piecemeal inductivism is a non-starter. As Coady says, ‘it seems absurd to suggest that, individually, we have done anything like the amount of fieldwork that [Humes view] requires’ [4, p. 82]. But is this a problem with inductivism per se? Must any version of inductivism fall prey to the objection that we simply haven’t, indeed can’t, do enough first-person report-fact checking to sustain the claim that testimony is generally reliable? One might think so. Coady [4], Schmitt [19], and Sosa [20], for example, all more or less equate inductivism with Humes piecemeal approach. According to Jack Lyons, however, this is a mistake. In a recent paper, Lyons suggests that the problem with Humes view is not that it is inductivist, but that ‘it assumes that our [inductive] evidence for the reliability of testimony must come in the form of personally experiencing a

Clarity about concessive knowledge attributions: reply to Dodd

Recently, Dylan Dodd (this Journal) has tried to clear up what he takes to be some of the many confusions surrounding concessive knowledge attributions (CKAs)—i.e., utterances of the form “S knows that p, but it’s possible that q” (where q entails not-p) (Rysiew, Noûs 35(4): 477–514, 2001). Here, we respond to the criticisms Dodd offers of the account of the semantics and the sometime-infelicity of CKAs we have given (Dougherty and Rysiew, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 78(1): 121–132, 2009), showing both how Dodd misunderstands certain central features of that view and how the latter can, pace Dodd, be naturally extended to explain the oddity of those “For all I know” statements to which Dodd draws attention.

Beyond Words: Communication, Truthfulness, and Understanding

Testimony is an indispensable source of information. Yet, contrary to ‘literalism’, speakers rarely mean just what they say; and even when they do, that itself is something the hearer needs to realize. So, understanding instances of testimony requires more than merely reading others’ messages off of the words they utter. Further, a very familiar and theoretically well-entrenched approach to how we arrive at such understanding serves to emphasize, not merely how deeply committed we are to testimony as a reliable source of information, but that epistemological questions about testimonial belief are – perhaps even must be – posterior to such a commitment. This result does not itself dictate any particular views on the epistemology of testimony. However, not only does the failure of literalism not support the view that the justificatory basis of testimonybased beliefs is importantly inferential; it in fact undermines a key premise in one important argument for the view that one needs independent, positive reasons for accepting a given testimonial report. More generally, the present paper illustrates how discussions of the epistemology of testimony might usefully interact with an examination of the epistemology of understanding. 1 . I N T R O D U C T I O N It’s a familiar refrain in the testimony literature that linguistic communication constitutes an indispensable source of information: deprived of such knowledge as we acquire from others, our lives, intellectual and otherwise, would be different in ways we can only begin to imagine.1 But while it’s commonly agreed that testimony is for this reason of central epistemological import, relatively little attention has been paid to how linguistic communication actually proceeds. Thus, the common form of posing epistemological issues surrounding testimony goes something like this: Another tells me that p. Under what conditions, and in virtue of what, am I justified2 in believing, or can I come to know, that p? Must I have independent reason for taking the speaker to be reliable? Must my interlocutor herself know that p in order for me to know it on her say-so? And wherein lies the epistemological significance of the DOI: 10.3366/E1742360007000093 E P I S T E M E 2 0 0 7 285 March 6, 2008 Time: 05:23pm epi009.tex

Reid's First Principle #7

By Reids own account, ‘That the natural faculties, by which we distinguish truth from error, are not fallacious’ (FP#7), has a special place among the First Principles of Contingent Truths. Some have found that claim puzzling, but it is not. Contrary to whats usually assumed, certain FPs preceding FP#7 do not already assert the better part of what FP#7 explicitly states. FP#7 is needed because there is nothing epistemological in the FPs that precede it; and its special place among the FPs is a straightforward consequence of its being both perfectly general and distinctively epistemological.