Consuming knowledge claims across contexts

Emil F. Lundbjerg Moeller

pp. 4057-4070

in: Markus Eronen, Raphael van Riel (eds), Understand though modeling, Synthese 192 (12), 2015.

Abstract

Williamson and others have argued that contextualist theories of the semantics of ‘know’ have a special problem of accounting for our practices of ‘consuming’ knowledge attributions and denials made in other contexts. In what follows, I shall understand the objection as the idea that contextualism has a special problem of accounting for how we are able to acquire epistemically useful information from knowledge claims made in other contexts. I respond to the objection by arguing (a) that the defeasibility of knowledge makes it difficult for everyone to acquire epistemically useful information from knowledge claims made in other contexts, and (b) that there is no special problem for contextualism when it comes to acquiring epistemically useful information from knowledge claims made in other contexts.