Evaluating Epistemic Contextualism, Cont.
In this post, I addressed various concerns with epistemic contextualism (EC). In this entry, I’ll discuss another problem, which seems more basic and devastating to EC. In short, the contextualist begs the question against the epistemic skeptic.
EC is the thesis that whether or not knowledge attributions (e.g., ‘Jones knows that p’) are true depends on the factors of a given epistemic or conversational context. In some contexts, ‘Jones knows that p’ is true; in others, the attribution is false because the context is different. EC is thus a context-relative position such that whether or not a knowledge ascription is true is relative to the context-sensitive factors of a given epistemic situation.
According to EC, in some situations, ‘knowledge’ is used to refer to an ordinary mental state, such as fallibly justified belief. For example, if your neighbor claims to know that there’s a tree in his yard, or that his favored team will win the game tonight, he’s probably making an ordinary claim about an every-day kind of matter. What he means by “I know that there is a tree in the yard” is that, in usual circumstances, he is quite justified in believing that there is a tree. But in other situations, ‘knowledge’ refers to something much more demanding, such as epistemic certainty or infallibility with respect to the item of knowledge claimed. For instance, if a skeptic asserts that Jones doesn’t know that he is not in the Matrix, the skeptic is referring to something like epistemic certainty, and in this context, ‘knowledge’ refers to such certainty.
Now, the contextualist claims that, in such cases, the skeptic is raising the standard for what counts as knowledge by introducing a conversational context which requires a very high epistemic requirement – namely, a context having to do with the epistemology of a Matrix-situation. However, when that unusual conversation about the Matrix ends, we might well return to ordinary conversations (perhaps around a billiards table, as Hume might put it) which deal with topics such as whether there is a tree in the yard or whether the Dodgers will win tonight, and thus the standard will drop to something much less demanding.
This response to the skeptic by the contextualist seems to beg the question against the skeptic, at least insofar as contextualism is a philosophical claim about what knowledge is (rather than merely a semantic thesis about what the word means in different liguistic contexts). To claim that the skeptic raises the standard (for what counts as knowledge) to the level of epistemic certainty presupposes that the standard wasn’t already there. But this is just what the (invariant) skeptic claims: the standard for knowledge is always epistemic certainty (or something similar). This standard does not vary according to time or context or personal interest. Hence, the contextualist’s standard-raising response is not very effective against skepticism, since it presupposes the falsehood of skepticism rather than providing an independent reason for rejecting it.