Abstract
Abstract This book symposium comprises a precis of Nuno Venturinha’s Description of Situations: An Essay in Contextualist Epistemology (Springer, 2018) together with four critical commentaries on different aspects of the book by Marcelo Carvalho, Joao Vergilio Gallerani Cuter, Marcos Silva and Darlei Dall’Agnol, and the author’s replies.
Highlights
Let me illustrate some of these worries with an example
Despite EC’s ingeniously crafted argument, do not the attributors presuppose that both Ralph and the scientists are knowing something by means of making approximations to its truth? This way of speaking is essentially uncongenial to any EC theorist because the basic assumption of contextualism is precisely, as Kevin Hermberg sensitively put it, “that truth and knowledge are relative to a specific social context and that there is no such thing as objective truth arrived at by cognizers” (2011, 163)
In reflecting upon the “contextually sensitive” nature of “chance ascriptions”, which are conceived within an “objectivism about chance”, Toby Handfield avers apropos of context-sensitivity that “ it might mean that what proposition is asserted by a given sentence may depend, in part, on subjective factors, the truth conditions for the proposition asserted need not depend on subjective factors” (2012, 123)
Summary
Epistemic Contextualism ( EC) is standardly taken to be concerned with knowledge attributions and to have as its main feature the indexicality of “know”. That’s the point!” Ralph does not know p because he himself or someone else attributes this knowledge to him on the presumption that to “know” means in this context to estimate fortnightly spring tides. He does know p because he knows something about p that originates from p. As the radical sceptic has no qualms about raising doubts about what normal people take for granted, defenders of a flat earth make use of the most perverse arguments to call into question all scientific evidence that the earth is spherical Astonishing as it may seem, all that EC can say about flat earthers and radical sceptics is that, given their unusually high epistemic standards, they may well be right. I do not think that epistemologists should be satisfied with such a muddle about what is to know, especially if they are committed to solving the sceptical problem instead of sweeping it under the rug
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