Knowledge Ascriptions

Abstract

Recent epistemology has focused as much on knowledge ascriptions as it has on knowledge. As one would expect from the title, this collection of essays continues the trend. These essays not only advance existing work on the semantics, cognitive bases and social roles of knowledge ascriptions, they offer an insight into why epistemologists think that we can learn something about knowledge by looking at knowledge ascriptions in general, and their semantics, cognitive bases and social roles in particular. Thus, this collection will be of great use not only to those who want to get a taste of recent work in epistemology, but also to those who want to understand why epistemologists regard the semantics, cognitive bases and social roles of knowledge ascriptions as worthy objects of study. In this review, I summarize each contribution, and make a few remarks along the way. I close with two mildly critical observations. In their introduction, Jessica Brown and Mikkel Gerken do a nice job of introducing and explaining three ‘turns’ in recent epistemology: the linguistic, cognitive and social. Put roughly, the linguistic turn investigates the semantics and pragmatics of knowledge ascriptions, the cognitive turn investigates psychological explanations of the making of knowledge ascriptions and the social turn investigates the roles that knowledge ascriptions play in our day-to-day lives. The essays that follow can largely be divided according to which of the turns they focus on.