Possibilities regained: neo-Lewisian contextualism and ordinary life

Abstract

According to David Lewis, the predicate ‘knows’ is context-sensitive in the sense that its truth conditions vary across conversational contexts, which stretch or compress the domain of error possibilities to be eliminated by the subject’s evidence (Lewis, Aust J Philos 74:549–567, 1996; Lewis, J Philos Log 8:339–359, 1979). Our concern in this paper is to thematize, assess, and overcome within a neo-Lewisian contextualist project two important mismatches between our use of ‘know’ in ordinary life and the use of ‘know’ by ‘Lewisian’ ordinary speakers. The first mismatch is that Lewisian contextualism still overgenerates the error possibilities which cannot be ignored in a given context, since it is oblivious to the distinction between ‘invented’ and ‘discovered’ possibilities. The second mismatch is a full-scale one: an adequate account of knowledge attribution is not exhausted by the subject’s negative capacity of pruning branches off the tree of counterpossibilities. We therefore introduce a new vector of value, which explains how ‘know’ comes in degrees: the satisfaction of ‘know better’ is made to depend on the capacity of imagining (actualized) possibilities connected in a relevant way with the subject’s (true) beliefs.