Interests Contextualism



McKenna, Robin ORCID: 0000-0001-5129-7850
(2011) Interests Contextualism. PHILOSOPHIA, 39 (4). pp. 741-750.

[img] Text
Interests Contextualism FINAL.pdf - Author Accepted Manuscript

Download (167kB)

Abstract

In this paper I develop a version of contextualism that I call interests contextualism. Interests contextualism is the view that the truth-conditions of knowledge ascribing and denying sentences are partly determined by the ascriber's interests and purposes. It therefore stands in opposition to the usual view on which the truth-conditions are partly determined by the ascriber's conversational context. I give an argument against one particular implementation of the usual view, differentiate interests contextualism from other prominent versions of contextualism and argue that, unlike those versions, interests contextualism can mitigate against the epistemic descent objection put forward by Duncan Pritchard in his 'Contextualism, Scepticism, and the Problem of Epistemic Descent' (the objection is that, on the contextualist view, an ascriber of knowledge cannot, for some subject S and proposition p, properly ascribe knowledge that p to S if that ascriber has previously retracted an earlier ascription of knowledge that p to S). © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

Item Type: Article
Uncontrolled Keywords: Epistemology, Contextualism, Practical interests, Salience, Epistemic descent
Depositing User: Symplectic Admin
Date Deposited: 12 Sep 2018 15:38
Last Modified: 19 Jan 2023 01:17
DOI: 10.1007/s11406-011-9316-7
Related URLs:
URI: https://livrepository.liverpool.ac.uk/id/eprint/3026178