Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

In this talk, I lay out an account of the pragmatics of Knowledge, which handles the standard examples propelled by Epistemic Contextualism and Pragmatic Encroachment approaches, and offer an alternative. Epistemic Contextualism and Pragmatic Encroachment (most notably represented by Subject-Sensitive Invariantism – SSI) offered accounts of knowledge in which contextual standards or stakes play a major role in the semantics of knowledge ascriptions. These accounts were propelled mostly by examples that seemed to require a pragmatic component in the truth-conditions of knowledge ascriptions in order to be accounted for.

    By contrast, I offer a pragmatic account which, I claim, explains the examples in question, and specifically their clear pragmatic character within the pragmatic field, obviating the need for introducing pragmatic ingredients into the semantics of knowledge ascriptions that invoke contextual standards or stakes. The main pragmatic components I employ are rational assertibility and especially what, I argue, is a specific pragmatic role of the use of knowledge. By accounting for the intuitions associated with the paradigmatic examples, this account offers new insights and constraints on the methodology of using intuitions as evidence for semantic features, with a variety of repercussions.