Epistemological contextualism: Problems and prospects

Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 55, Issue 219, 2005, Pages 161-171

  Brady, Michael ^a   Pritchard, Duncan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF STIRLING   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 51149102806     PISSN: 00318094     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.0031-8094.2005.00393.x     Document Type: Article

References (27)

1. See S. Cohen, 'Contextualism and Skepticism', Philosophical Issues, 10 (2000), pp. 94-107, at p. 94, for a neat presentation of this point
2. See J.L. Austin, 'Other Minds', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. 20 (1946), pp. 148-87
3. L. Wittgenstein, On Certainty, ed. G.E.M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1969)
4. Variants on the contextualist thesis can also be found (sometimes in just a suggestive form) in the following texts: A. Goldman, 'Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge', Journal of Philosophy, 73 (1976), pp. 771-91
5. G.C. Stine, 'Skepticism, Relevant Alternatives, and Deductive Closure', Philosophical Studies, 29 (1976), pp. 249-61
6. D.B. Annis, 'A Contextualist Theory of Justification', American Philosophical Quarterly, 15 (1978), pp. 213-19
7. F. Dretske, 'The Pragmatic Dimension of Knowledge', Philosophical Studies, 40 (1981), pp. 363-78
8. M. Williams, Unnatural Doubts: Epistemological Realism and the Basis of Scepticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991)
9. See D. Lewis, 'Scorekeeping in a Language Game', Journal of Philosophical Logic, 8 (1979), pp. 339-59
10. See K. DeRose, 'Solving the Skeptical Problem', Philosophical Review, 104 (1995), pp. 1-52
11. Cohen, 'Contextualism and Skepticism'
12. Lewis, 'Elusive Knowledge', Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 74 (1996), pp. 549-67
13. The first tactic of simply denying (SI) is often called the 'Moorean' anti-sceptical strategy, since it shares certain features with the response to scepticism offered by G.E. Moore. See Moore, 'A Defence of Common Sense', Contemporary British Philosophy (2nd series), ed. J.H. Muirhead (London: Allen and Unwin, 1925)
14. and 'Proof of an External World', Proceedings of the British Academy, 25 (1939), pp. 273-300
15. For the main discussions of the second tactic of denying the closure principle, see Dretske, 'Epistemic Operators', Journal of Philosophy, 67 (1970), pp. 1007-23
16. R. Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Oxford UP, 1981)
17. For more on this problem, see D. Pritchard, 'Recent Work on Radical Skepticism', American Philosophical Quarterly, 39 (2002), pp. 215-57, in §6. Crispin Wright also explores this problem for the contextualist treatment of scepticism in his contribution to this volume
18. See P. Unger, 'A Defence of Skepticism', Philosophical Review, 80 (1971), pp. 198-219
19. See Unger, Philosophical Relativity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1984)
20. For a development of this line of critique, see Pritchard, 'Contextualism, Skepticism, and the Problem of Epistemic Descent', Diabetica, 55 (2001), pp. 327-49
21. For more on this point, see Pritchard, 'Contextualism, Skepticism and Warranted Assertability Manœuvres', in J. Keim-Campbell, M. O'Rourke and H. Silverstein (eds), Knowledge and Skepticism (MIT Press, forthcoming)
22. For the first sustained development of this sort of objection, see P. Rysiew, 'The Context-Sensitivity of Knowledge Attributions', Noûs, 35 (2001), pp. 477-514
23. See especially, J. Hawthorne, Knowledge and Lotteries (Oxford UP, 2004)
24. J. Stanley, 'On the Linguistic Basis for Contextualism', Philosophical Studies, 119 (2004), pp. 119-46
25. See especially Rysiew, 'The Context-Sensitivity of Knowledge Attributions'
26. See DeRose, 'Contextualism: an Explanation and Defense', in J. Greco and E. Sosa (eds), Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 187-205
27. and 'Knowledge, Assertion, and Context', Philosophical Review, 111 (2002), pp. 167-203