Countering the Counter Examples of Stewart Cohen: An Advancement of David Lewis’ Contextualist Solution to Gettier Problem, Lottery Paradox and Sceptical Paradox

The main topic of this paper is conversational contextualism, one of the most dominant versions of epistemic contextualism, endorsed by David Lewis. Proponents of conversational contextualism, including Lewis, argue that the key advantage of this view lies in its unique way of analyzing and solving the most prominent epistemological problems. Among those problems are the skeptical paradox, the Gettier problem and the Lottery paradox. The first part of the paper is concerned with the general features of conversational contextualism. In the second part of the paper the author highlights the main hypotheses of conversational contextualism, proposed by Lewis, as an attempt to solve the Gettier problem and the Lottery paradox. The last part of the paper analyzes the pros and cons of the Lewisian solutions to the aforementioned problems. The key part in that analysis is the Cohen?s criticism of those solutions.

This chapter argues that by attending to the illocutionary force of knowledge attributions — specifically, that they serve to give credit to the believer for getting things right — fallibilists can assuage two problems plaguing their concept of knowledge: namely, the lottery problem and the Gettier problem. Borrowing work from Joel Fienberg on blaming, an account of credit attribution is developed that stresses the relationship between causal salience and causal responsibility. Because causal salience is context sensitive, resolutions to the lottery problem and the Gettier problem contain a significant contextual element. Just as an agent must be causally responsible in order to receive credit for athletic feats, so too must an agent's cognitive character or intellectual virtue be a necessary element to explain why an agent is deserving of credit for obtaining a true belief. This account is tested against cases relative to the above problems and ends with how this account can explain the value of knowledge.

At the beginning of this paper a formulation of skeptical paradox is offered. Subsequently, possible types of anti-skeptical answers to this paradox are shown. Special attention is paid to the determination of the contextualistic versus other anti-skeptical answers. Two versions of contextualism are then presented, in order to more accurately determine Williams' contextualist view by their comparative analysis. Presentation of this view is supplemented by the display of Williams' understanding of knowledge in nonepistemological contexts. In the end, two objections to the Williams' contextualist view are exposed, and the answers to them are offered.

In this article, I present a modified reliabilist theory of knowledge which purports to solve many of the problems currently facing standard reliabilism. With the help of a dispositionally construed reliabilist theory of knowledge and justification (DRK and DRJ), tentative responses to the following problems for reliabilism are offered: The New Evil Demon Problem, The Clairvoyance Problem, The Mr. Truetemp Problem, The Gettier Problem, Barn Cases (Brandom’s and Goldman’s), and The Lottery Problem. Lastly, I argue that, despite diverging from the letter of standard reliabilism, DRK and DRJ remain within the spirit of reliabilist epistemology

In When is True Belief Knowledge? (2012) Richard Foley proposes an original and strikingly simple theory of knowledge: a subject S knows some proposition p if and only if S truly believes that p and does not lack any important information. If this view is correct, Foley allegedly solves a wide variety of epistemological problems, such as the Gettier problem, the lottery paradox, the so-called ‘value problem’, and the problem of skepticism. However, a central component of his view is that whether a true belief counts as knowledge depends on the importance of the information that one has or lacks. My paper raises doubts about whether there is a non-circular way to distinguish important information from unimportant information. I argue that there is no way to distinguish important information from unimportant information without ultimately making reference to knowledge; thus, Foley’s new theory of knowledge does not achieve its goals.

A commonly expressed worry in the contemporary literature on the problem of epistemological scepticism is that there is something deeply intellectually unsatisfying about the dominant anti-sceptical theories. In this paper I outline the main approaches to scepticism and argue that they each fail to capture what is essential to the sceptical challenge because they fail to fully understand the role that the problem of epistemic luck plays in that challenge. I further argue that scepticism is best thought of not as a quandary directed at our possession of knowledge simpliciter, but rather as concerned with a specific kind of knowledge that is epistemically desirable. On this view, the source of scepticism lies in a peculiarly epistemic form of angst. 1One finds explicit formulations of the sceptical paradox along these lines in, for example, DeRose [1995], Sosa [1999], Vogel [1990], and Pritchard [2002d], and even where the sceptical paradox is not explicitly formulated in this way, it is usually clear that such a formulation is being presupposed. For more on how the sceptical problem is understood in the contemporary debate, see Pritchard [2002c]. It is always by favour of Nature that one knows something. [Wittgenstein 1969: §505]

Ever since Fred Dretske (1970) questioned closure, a denial of this principle has been among the standard options for a resolution of epistemological paradoxes such as the skeptical paradox (Cohen 1988) and the lottery paradox (Harman 1973). In this article, the author shall argue that all possible solutions of the latter paradox can only be defended if Multi-Premise Closure is rejected. These possible solutions are contextualism and both simple and sensitive moderate invariantism. It will be shown that skepticism and the denial of Single-Premise Closure are not possible solutions of the lottery paradox. The upshot of the discussion here will be that while Single-Premise Closure is beyond reasonable doubt, resolving the lottery paradox forces one to abandon Multi-Premise Closure.

David Lewis developed one of the most prominent versions of epistemic contextualism (EC) in Elusive Knowledge [2], which is also known as a version of relevant alternatives theory (RAT). In this work, I propose a simple formalization of Lewis account, which results in our basic Lewisian epistemic logic (LEL). Trivial as it may seem, my formalization focuses directly on Lewis’s theory, and thus provides a firm basis to discuss his theses on anti-skepticism, infallible knowledge, rules of relevance, and especially “knowledge without belief”. Moreover, my formalization not only avoids problems of two former existed formalizations [1],[3], but also partly answers Holliday’s question how a relevant alternatives theorist should handle higher-order knowledge [1].KeywordsEpistemic contextualismrelevant alternativeselusive knowledgeLewisian epistemic logic

Although recent epistemology has been marked by several prominent disagreements – e.g., between foundationalists and coherentists, internalists and externalists – there has been widespread agreement that some form of fallibilism must be correct. According to a rough formulation of this view, it is possible for a subject to have knowledge even in cases where the justification or grounding for the knowledge is compatible with the subject’s being mistaken. In this paper, I examine the motivation for fallibilism before providing a fully general account of the view. I conclude by looking at the two major difficulties for fallibilism: the Gettier problem and the lottery paradox.

This paper defends the epistemological doctrine of fallibilism from recent objections. In “The Myth of Knowledge” Laurence BonJour argues that we should reject fallibilism for two main reasons: first, there is no adequate way to specify what level of justification is required for fallible knowledge; second, we cannot explain why any level of justification that is less than fully conclusive should have the significance that makes knowledge valuable. I will reply to these challenges in a way that allows me to make progress on a number of important issues in contemporary epistemology: epistemic value, the functional roles of knowledge attributions, experimental epistemology, skepticism, the Gettier problem, and the lottery paradox. My argument is motivated by appealing to various insights derived from the method of ‘practical explication’, particularly the idea that a central purpose of the concept of knowledge is to flag reliable informants. My conclusion is that various practical and theoretical considerations derived from the method of practical explication support the fallibilist conception of knowledge.

Analytic epistemology is thriving. Many people, however, think that it has gone wrong. They judge that it has become a new scholastics, narrow-minded, obsessed by a small set of problems, most of them examined through repetitive examples, thought experiments and paradoxes, such as the Gettier cases, stories about fake barns, bank cases, brains in vats and evil demons, or the lottery paradox. Philip Kitcher is one of these critics. In an article called “Epistemology without history is blind” published in Erkenntnis in 2011, he takes his stand from William James, “There can be no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a difference elsewhere” and judges severely the production of contemporary epistemologists. I disagree. Kitcher’s judgment is hasty, and analytic epistemology is not guilty of the sins that he denounces

This book develops a novel account of epistemic contextualism based on the idea that pragmatic presuppositions play a central role in the semantics of knowledge attributions. According to the main thesis of the book, knowledge attributions are sensitive to what is pragmatically presupposed at the context of ascription. The resulting theory—Presuppositional Epistemic Contextualism (PEC)—is simple and straightforward, yet powerful enough to have far-reaching and important consequences for a variety of hotly debated issues in epistemology and philosophy of language. The book begins by developing Presuppositional Epistemic Contextualism and then explores its ability to resolve various sceptical paradoxes and puzzles. In subsequent chapters PEC is defended against familiar and widely discussed philosophical and linguistic objections to contextualism. In the final chapters of the book PEC is employed to illuminate a variety of issues central to contemporary discussions of epistemological issues, such as Gettier cases, Moorean reasoning, the nature of evidence, and other current problems and puzzles.

This chapter introduces the main objectives and motivations of the book and offers a detailed outline of subsequent chapters. It describes the structure of the book, which begins by developing Presuppositional Epistemic Contextualism and then explores its ability to resolve various sceptical paradoxes and puzzles. In subsequent chapters PEC is defended against familiar and widely discussed philosophical and linguistic objections to contextualism. In the final chapters of the book PEC is employed to illuminate a variety of issues central to contemporary discussions of epistemological issues, such as Gettier cases, Moorean reasoning, the nature of evidence, and other current problems and puzzles.

It took about ten years for people to get the idea that there was something wrong with the Gettier Problem. By the early 1970s, a number of analyses had been offered to accommodate Gettier’s (1963) counter examples to the traditional ‘JTB’ view: Michael Clark’s (1963) simple no-false-lemmas proposal, various ‘indefeasibility’ analyses beginning with Lehrer (1965) and Lehrer and Paxson (1969), and Goldman’s (1967) original causal theory, among others. Those analyses had run into further counterexamples; revision after revision had been offered, only to meet further and more elaborate counterexamples. Not only was there no end in sight; there was not even a sense of beginning to converge.

I challenge a cornerstone of the Gettier debate: that a proposed analysis of the concept of knowledge is inadequate unless it entails that people don’t know in Gettier cases. I do so from the perspective of Carnap’s methodology of explication. It turns out that the Gettier problem per se is not a fatal problem for any account of knowledge, thus understood. It all depends on how the account fares regarding other putative counter examples and the further Carnapian desiderata of exactness, fruitfulness and simplicity. Carnap proposed his methodology more than a decade before Gettier’s seminal paper appeared, making the present solution to the problem a candidate for being the least ad hoc proposal on the market, one whose independent standing cannot be questioned, among solutions that depart from the usual method of revising a theory of knowledge in the light of counterexamples. As an illustration of the method at work, I reconstruct reliabilism as an attempt to provide an explication of the (externalist) concept of knowledge.