The Commitment Towards (a) and (b)

Abstract

One manner to solve the factivity problem consists of denying that the contextualists are committed to the premises of the conundrum. Thus, accordingly, one might allege that the contextualists are not committed neither to the truth of any specific knowledge ascription like (b), “Oliver knowsO that q”, nor to the claim that such a knowledge ascription is not knowable according to certain epistemic standards. In this chapter we will see two employments of this strategy. The first is due to Freitag, who develops a minimal reading of contextualism that does not entail any commitment towards knowledge ascriptions or knowledge denials; the latter is due to Dinges, who considers the factivity problem from a different angle—he aims to show that the certain entailments of the contextualist anti-sceptical argument can be coherently known and asserted in a sceptical context. We will conclude that if Dinges’ strategy fails since it cannot avoid the commitment towards (b)-like propositions, that proposed by Freitag is successful in solving the conundrum, but achieves this result by means of a serious weakening of contextualism.