Knowledge and Approximate Knowledge

2017

The verb ‘knows’ is often treated as an intensional operator, and the logic of knowledge is often modelled with a modal operator K—a quantifier over ways that things could be compatible with a subject’s knowledge (or evidence). ‘Knows’ is also often taken to be context-sensitive in an interesting way. What ‘knows’ means seems to be sensitive to the epistemic features of the context, e.g. the epistemic standard in play, the set of relevant alternatives, etc. There are standard model-theoretic semantic frameworks which deal with both intensional operators and contextsensitive expressions. The basic elements of these frameworks were developed by Montague (1968), Scott (1970), and Lewis (1970), and then received more sophisticated renditions and philosophical interpretations in Kaplan (1989a) and Lewis (1980). In this chapter, we provide a brief overview of the various moving parts of these frameworks, the roles of context and index, the need for double indexing, and the relationship be...

In this chapter, we follow Edward Craig's (1990) advice: ask what the concept of knowledge does for us and use our findings as clues about its application conditions. What a concept does for us is a matter of what we can do with it, and what we do with concepts is deploy them in thought and language. So, we will examine the purposes we have in attributing knowledge. This chapter examines two such purposes, agent-evaluation and informant-suggestion, and brings the results to bear on an important debate about the application conditions of the concept of knowledge—the debate between contextualists and their rivals. } The paper responds to arguments from Jessica Brown that there is nothing special about the use of 'knows' to criticize and defend action. Briefly, I respond that by using 'knows that p' in this context we close off a certain sort of objection to one's evaluation of the action -- the "epistemic" objection, according to which the agent doesn't have good enough evidence, strong enough grounds for p. For instance, if I say, "Bob should have taken a left back there, because he knew the restaurant was on Elm Street!," I close off the objection "but Bob didn't have good enough grounds for thinking it was on Elm." Contrast this with criticizing Bob's action by say8ing, "Bob should have taken a left because he had reason to believe it was on Elm Street." This doesn't close off responses of the form "well, he had good reason, but not good enough; he didn't want to take the risk." Such a response isn't always appropriate, but it sometimes is. Using 'knows' closes it off in a way that using 'has reason to believe' doesn't. Using 'knew p' closes it off in a way that merely using 'p' or 'he truly believed that p' doesn't.

My aim in this paper is to motivate and defend a version of epistemic contextualism; a version, that is, of what came to be called attributor or ascriber contextualism. I will begin by outlining, in the first part, what I take to be the basic idea of and motivation behind the version of epistemic contextualism that I favor. In the second part, a couple of examples will be presented in order to illustrate the contextualist point. Since epistemic (ascriber) contextualists commonly claim that knowledge ascriptions are context-sensitive, the third part of the paper will be concerned with the phenomenon of context-sensitivity at a more general level. A more detailed inquiry into the context-sensitivity natural language expressions exhibit will prove helpful in order to counter the objection that postulating context-sensitivity in the case of knowledge ascriptions is an ad-hoc-maneuver. Given that epistemic contextualism is partly an epistemological thesis, party a linguistic thesis, the remainder of the paper will be devoted to the question of how to semantically model the kind of context-sensitivity exhibited by knowledge ascriptions. The upshot will be that there are two different ways of semantically accommodating the context-sensitivity at issue. Both call for a more or less drastic departure from epistemological and semantic orthodoxy.

Minds and Machines, 2007

2011

The latest newcomer on the epistemology scene is Subject-Sensitive Invariantism (SSI), which is the view that even though the semantics of the verb “know” is invariant, the answer to the question of whether someone knows something is sensitive to factors about that person. Factors about the context of the purported knower are relevant to whether he knows some proposition p or not. In this paper I present Jason Stanley's version of SSI, a theory Stanley calls Interest-Relative Invariantism (IRI). The core epistemological claim of IRI is that knowledge is conceptually connected to practical interests. Stanley's defence of IRI is closely connected to practical reasoning, but unfortunately, I argue, IRI leads to bad practical reasoning. I furthermore show that Stanley's IRI cannot accommodate all of Stanley's five test cases for knowledge attribution, test cases that are supposed to (more or less) make or break theories of knowledge attribution. IRI also has some quite counterintuitive results and derives much of its appeal from one-sidedness of Stanley's examples. The net effect, I claim, is that IRI should be resisted. Keywords: knowledge, invariantism, action, uninterests, practical reasoning, Jason Stanley

ed. David Parkin, Semantic Anthropology, ASA Monograph Series No.22, (London, Academic Press), , 1982

New Perspectives on Concepts, 2010

Much recent work on concepts has been inspired by and is developed within the bounds of the representational theory of the mind often taken for granted by philosophers of mind, cognitive scientists, and psychologists alike (see e.g. Margolis and Laurence 1999; Stich and Warfield 1994). The contributions to this volume take a more encompassing perspective on the issue of concepts. Rather than modelling details of our representational architecture in line with the dominant paradigm, they explore three traditional issues concerning concepts. Inquiring into how language and the mind are interrelated, Brandom, Bermúdez, Nida-Rümelin and Racokzy ask:  Is mastery of a language necessary for thought? Pondering whether drawing on concepts to explain our thinking requires us to adopt the representational paradigm of the mind in the first place, Kenny, Glock, and Saporiti are concerned with the question:  Do concepts reduce to abilities? Finally, in order to assess the prospects for philosophical reliance on conceptual analysis, Jackson, Nimtz, Spicer, and Textor discuss:  Is the analysis of concepts a viable means to ascertain truths from the proverbial armchair? Needless to say, there is no consensus to be had on either issue. This introductory essay explores the backdrop to the debate our authors engage in. We will provide a rough geography of key ideas and issues shaping the overall debate on concepts within contemporary philosophy. We will proceed in two steps. In a first step, we will present and discuss key ideas

Cognition, 2022

Central to the conceptual spaces framework is the thought that concepts can be studied mathematically, by geometrical and topological means. Various applications of the framework have already been subjected to empirical testing, mostly with excellent results, demonstrating the framework's usefulness. So far untested is the suggestion that conceptual spaces may help explain certain inferences people are willing to make. The experiment reported in this paper focused on similarity-based arguments, testing the hypothesis that the strength of such arguments can be predicted from the structure of the conceptual space in which the items being reasoned about are represented. A secondary aim of the experiment concerned a recent inferentialist semantics for indicative conditionals, according to which the truth of a conditional requires the presence of a sufficiently strong inferential connection between its antecedent and consequent. To the extent that the strength of similarity-based inferences can be predicted from the geometry and topology of the relevant conceptual space, such spaces should help predict truth ratings of conditionals embodying a similarity-based inferential link. The results supported both hypotheses.

Many attempts have been made to capture, on the one hand, the nature of knowledge, and on the other hand, the nature of context. In this paper, we compare the two concepts of context and knowledge which, obviously, share some common aspects. Rather than trying to precisely define knowledge and context, we review the generally proposed characteristics of both concepts and while we conclude to a large overlapping of the two concepts, we also emphasize their differences as regards decision making and action.