Possibilities regained: neo-Lewisian contextualism and ordinary life
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Possibilities regained: neo-Lewisian contextualism and ordinary life Mario Piazza1 · Nevia Dolcini2
Received: 16 December 2014 / Accepted: 29 October 2015 © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
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. Keywords Epistemology · Knowledge attribution · Epistemic contextualism · David Lewis · Epistemic modals · Imagination
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Mario Piazza [email protected] Nevia Dolcini [email protected]
1
Department of Philosophy, University of Chieti-Pescara, Chieti, Italy
2
Philosophy and Religious Studies Programme, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Macau, Macau, China
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Synthese
1 Elusive abundance What kind of evaluation do we perform when we inquire as to whether someone knows that something is so? Lewis’s answer in ‘Elusive Knowledge’ is that this evaluation, or knowledge attribution, is a phenomenon both eminently modal and eminently contextual, that is shaped in subtle ways by human interactions in language. The predicate ‘knows’ is context-sensitive in the sense that its truth conditions vary across conversational contexts in which the predicate is employed, since these conversational contexts circumscribe the domain of error possibilities to be eliminated by the putative knower’s evidence (Lewis 1996, 1979). Thus, as held by any brand of epistemic contextualism, a sentence of the form ‘S knows that p’ (even when p is expressed by an indexicalfree statement) is not truth-evaluable as it stands: it may express a true proposition as uttered in one context, and a false one as uttered in another.1 One common, and at least initially attractive, way to convey the core idea of epistemic contextualism is to say that knowledge ascriptions are context-sensitive in roughly the same way as tallness or elegance ascriptions are: a tall jockey may be a lilliputian basketball player, an
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