Contextualism: The truth of a knowledge claim depends on the context in which it is uttered. A claim such as “Alice knows that she is not in the Matrix” might be true in certain contexts (when explaining to someone in ordinary conversation why Alice didn’t lose sleep over the movie Matrix) but false in other contexts (when uttered in an epistemology class in a discussion about the possibility of us being in the Matrix). The usual analysis is that the same sentence about knowledge expresses different propositions in different contexts (just like the sentence “It’s raining here” expresses different propositions in different contexts).
Relativism: Whether a subject possesses knowledge of a certain proposition is relative to a set of epistemic standards. Relative to one such set, she might know that the proposition is true, while relative to another set, she does not qualify as knowing this. So, strictly speaking, “knowledge” is a three-place function, taking as arguments a subject, a proposition and a set of standards.
Invariantism: Knowledge claims are either true or false simpliciter. Their truth does not vary depending on context, and they are not relativized to epistemic standards.
EDIT: A couple of people have said that the difference between contextualism and relativism is unclear. I have tried to clarify in this comment.
That doesn’t match my intuition about what “relativism” means here, but I haven’t taken any epistemology in a while so I’m more likely to be wrong, I think.
In relativism, a single utterance of a knowledge claim can be assessed differently depending on the assessor’s epistemic standards. So the truth value of a knowledge claim can vary depending on who is doing the assessing.
In contextualism, the truth value of a knowledge claim only varies if the context of utterance is different. A single utterance of a knowledge claim will have a fixed truth value, independent of who is assessing the claim. You only get variance when you vary the context in which the utterance is made, just like you only get variance in the meaning of “It’s raining here” if you vary the context in which it is uttered.
Er… well, not yet, but might be a step towards helping.
I get that, if the conditions “different assessor” and “different context of utterance” are separable, then relativism makes distinct claims from contextualism. That is, if I have a different assessor but the same context (or even the same assessor whose epistemic standards have changed, and the same context), then contextualism asserts that the truth value of my claims is necessarily unchanged, and relativism asserts that it might change.
What I can’t fathom is how that happens, even in principle. Isn’t the assessor, and the assessor’s epistemic standards, part of the context of the utterance?
What I can’t fathom is how that happens, even in principle. Isn’t the assessor, and the assessor’s epistemic standards, part of the context of the utterance?
So imagine you read an ancient text in which the claim “the voice of Zeus follows upon his blows” appears as a description of the relation between thunder and lightening. THe assessor and facts about the assessor are nowhere part of the context of the utterance, because the utterance was made thousands of years before you were born.
An invariantist would say ‘that’s false, there’s no such thing as Zeus’.
A relativist would say ’That’s false to me (no Zeus), but it might have been true for the person who wrote it if they had different standards for truth.”
A contextualist would say ‘So Zeus doesn’t exist, but the voice and blows of Zeus are just terms for lightening and thunder. If someone made this comment knowing what we know about stoms, it would be false. But I assess this statement as true, because I take the utterer to be talking about lightening and thunder.’
The assessor doesn’t have to be a person standing there listening to the utterance. Suppose I told you that my friend Alice says that she knows OJ Simpson killed his wife, and I ask you what you think about her knowledge claim. If you were a relativist, you would evaluate the truth of the knowledge claim in accord with your epistemic standards, or you might even say, “Well, relative to standards X her knowledge claim is true, but relative to standards Y it’s false.”
If you were a contextualist, on the other hand, you’d ask me “In what context did she make this knowledge claim?” and then base your evaluation of the knowledge claim on my answer. You allow the context to set the epistemic standard you use for evaluation.
Another example: Suppose Bob says “Alice knows P” in one context, and Charlie says “Alice doesn’t know P” in another context. For a contextualist, it might be the case that Bob and Charlie are not disagreeing at all. If the contexts are sufficiently different, you can’t pit their knowledge claims against one another. A relativist, on the other hand, can pit the knowledge claims against one another, by relativizing them to the same epistemic standard. Only one of them will be true according to that standard.
Ah! (lightbulb goes on) Throughout, I have been implicitly understanding “context” to mean context of evaluation. Which is not what we mean at all, we mean context of utterance. Which, indeed, you even said explicitly, and I failed to read carefully enough.
Yes, this makes perfect sense.
Thinking about this now, I think I endorse contextualism, even though attempting to implement it gives me a headache. That is, whether I’m comfortable saying that you actually know X is a function of what evidence for and against X I believe you’re aware of, but my brain strongly tends to replace (my beliefs about) what evidence you’re aware of with what evidence I’m aware of.
Basically, philosophers are sufficiently agreed on epistemology that both mean basically the same thing for the lay person’s understanding. There’s even a species of invariantism called “subject-sensitive invariantism” that is indistinguishable from contextualism to the uninitiated.
None of the prior discussion reflects an understanding of ‘contextualism’ as standardly conceived by philosophers (if the Stanford Encyclopedia exposition is representative of philosophers’ views). So I suspect the polling data for this question will need to be tossed out. Here’s a clearer explanation of the difference between these doctrines:
contextualism = The semantic thesis that ‘x knows y’ may vary in truth-value depending on the social and psychological status of the knowledge-attributor. I.e., ‘x knows y’ often or always fails to have a determinate truth-value, unless it is clear from context that we are really saying ‘x knows y relative to evaluator z,’ where z is someone evaluating ‘does x know y?’ Thus, a better name for ‘contextualism’ would be ‘attributor contextualism’ (which it has indeed been called).
Note that contextualism does not imply that the distribution of knowledge in the world is arbitrary or just a matter of subjective opinion; there may be very strict constraints on what sorts of ‘subjective opinions’ held by an evaluator affect knowledge-relative-to-an-evaluator. For instance, it is plausible that ‘I know I have hands’ would count as true if the evaluator were your psychiatrist, but would count as false if the evaluator were someone with whom you were debating the Simulation Hypothesis. That’s not because of the evaluator’s mere opinions; it’s because there are higher standards for knowledge in metaphysical debates than in everyday conversation. An evaluator with crazy, unrealistic standards wouldn’t have his/her own, equally legitimate beliefs about what counts as knowledge; s/he would just be consistently in error.
Nor is contextualism a meta-semantic claim about how the word ‘knowledge’ varies across linguistic communities; rather, it is the semantic claim that ‘knowledge’ in all (standard-English-speaking) contexts would frequently be judged to vary based on the state of the evaluator. Contextualism could turn out to be false for purely empirical reasons, if, say, sociological data proved that we don’t vary in knowledge-attribution based on the mental state and social context of the attributor.
relativism = The metaphysical thesis that knowledge as such is relative to a standard of assessment. Like contextualists, relativists think ‘know’ is three-place; but their relation is ‘x knows y according to standard z,’ not ‘x knows y relative to evaluator z.’ And whereas there are presumably facts about which agent is evaluating a knowledge-claim in the real world, there are no facts about which standard is the ‘right’ one; so there simply are no facts about knowledge, or even about knowledge-according-to-an-agent. What there are are facts about ‘what certain standards treat as being “knowledge”’.
I said that relativism is a ‘metaphysical’ view, not a semantic one. This is important. Contextualism can be refuted if it turns out that the English language is invariantist; but relativism can’t be so easily refuted, since their claim is not that we think of knowledge as relative, but that knowledge really is relative. Relativism is very close to radical skepticism, just with ‘knowledge’-talk preserved as a way of signaling one’s chosen standards. Whereas contextualism is just as opposed to skepticism as is invariantism. Speaking of which...
invariantism = The claim that we have knowledge of some things, combined with the semantic thesis that contextualism is false and the metaphysical thesis that relativism is false. According to an invariantist, ‘I know I have hands’ is either true or false simpliciter; evaluators and standards-of-evaluation might disagree about this statement’s truth-value, but that’s because some evaluators and some standards are wrong, not because ‘knowledge’ itself is unsaturated.
In your discussion of contextualism, you are conflating “evaluator” and “attributor”, I think. An attributor is someone who makes a knowledge-claim, i.e. attributes knowledge of some proposition to someone (including, possibly, to himself). An evaluator is someone who judges the truth of the knowledge-claim made by the attributor. So if you say “I know I have hands” to a psychologist, you are the attributor, not the psychologist. You are the one making the knowledge-claim (about yourself, in this case). The psychologist is the evaluator, and according to contextualism she will (or possibly should) evaluate your claim according to your context, not her own. So if the psychologist hears about you making the claim in the context of a discussion of the Simulation argument, she should probably judge it false, irrespective of the context in which she is situated at the time she is making the evaluation.
I believe this agrees more or less with the definition (and discussion) above. Your definitions of relativism and invariance seem to agree with mine.
In your discussion of contextualism, you are conflating “evaluator” and “attributor”, I think.
I wasn’t aware that there was an established distinction between the two. Thanks for the information! Though nothing of great weight can rest on it, since:
Every attributor is a (self-)evaluator. Asserting ‘p’ is equivalent to asserting ‘p is true’.
Every evaluator is an attributor. To determine that some attributor’s knowledge-claim is true or false, one must oneself attribute knowledge (or lack thereof) to the relevant agent.
if you say “I know I have hands” to a psychologist, you are the attributor, not the psychologist.
Yes. But if the psychologist evaluates your claim, by weighing in on its truth or falsehood, then the psychologist becomes a distinct attributor. I varied the psychologist or metaphysician as attributor, rather than paying much mind to self-attribution/self-evaluation, simply because I thought it would be less intuitive to talk about a person’s knowledge-claims failing to meet his or her own psychological/social state. But, sure, strictly speaking I could have just varied the psychological state of someone self-attributing knowledge, and thereby made that person’s own beliefs about his/her knowledge true or false. (At least, I think standard contextualist theories allow this.)
So if the psychologist hears about you making the claim in the context of a discussion of the Simulation argument, she should probably judge it false, irrespective of the context in which she is situated at the time she is making the evaluation.
Interesting. I think it’s more complicated than that. For instance, I think contextualism predicts that the psychologist, in a later dinner conversation with a metaphysician friend, might say: ‘Earlier I told a patient that he knew he had hands; but, of course, really he doesn’t have hands.’ The contextualist interprets this as meaning that the psychologist’s state has importantly changed, hence her knowledge-attributions have changed, hence her knowledge-evaluations have changed. (Presumably part of the reason the psychologist’s knowledge-attributions have changed in this case is that she’s in a social context that includes a metaphysician with psychologically embedded ‘higher standards’. I.e., contextualism predicts that social overlap produces synchronizations in correct knowledge attribution.)
Note that an invariantist might interpret the same data very differently. A relatively skeptical invariantist could suggest that the psychologist was speaking loosely, not-quite-correctly, when she said ‘Yes, you have hands.’ Or a relatively Moorean invariantist could suggest that the psychologist became too hyperskeptical in the face of social pressure from the metaphysician. On the other hand, a relativist would suggest that there isn’t any determinate answer to whether ‘Yes, you have hands.’ was right, nor to whether ‘No, he didn’t have hands’ was. Even stipulating all the contextual facts underdetermines whether knowledge is present.
Lean towards contextualism, but with some problems. For instance:
“I know that I have hands”
“I don’t know that I’m not a brain in a vat”
However, I’ve just asserted them side by side in the same context (of a Less Wrong discussion). And I don’t think relativism helps much either: can the assessor change their epistemic standards so quickly in the space of two consecutive sentences??
You’re allowed to be mistaken or lying. I suspect a contextualist would argue that exactly one of your assertions is true, depending on what the context of the discussion is.
Knowledge claims: contextualism, relativism, or invariantism?
[pollid:103]
Contextualism: The truth of a knowledge claim depends on the context in which it is uttered. A claim such as “Alice knows that she is not in the Matrix” might be true in certain contexts (when explaining to someone in ordinary conversation why Alice didn’t lose sleep over the movie Matrix) but false in other contexts (when uttered in an epistemology class in a discussion about the possibility of us being in the Matrix). The usual analysis is that the same sentence about knowledge expresses different propositions in different contexts (just like the sentence “It’s raining here” expresses different propositions in different contexts).
Relativism: Whether a subject possesses knowledge of a certain proposition is relative to a set of epistemic standards. Relative to one such set, she might know that the proposition is true, while relative to another set, she does not qualify as knowing this. So, strictly speaking, “knowledge” is a three-place function, taking as arguments a subject, a proposition and a set of standards.
Invariantism: Knowledge claims are either true or false simpliciter. Their truth does not vary depending on context, and they are not relativized to epistemic standards.
EDIT: A couple of people have said that the difference between contextualism and relativism is unclear. I have tried to clarify in this comment.
That doesn’t match my intuition about what “relativism” means here, but I haven’t taken any epistemology in a while so I’m more likely to be wrong, I think.
What is your intuition?
Don’t see much difference between contextualism and relativism.
In relativism, a single utterance of a knowledge claim can be assessed differently depending on the assessor’s epistemic standards. So the truth value of a knowledge claim can vary depending on who is doing the assessing.
In contextualism, the truth value of a knowledge claim only varies if the context of utterance is different. A single utterance of a knowledge claim will have a fixed truth value, independent of who is assessing the claim. You only get variance when you vary the context in which the utterance is made, just like you only get variance in the meaning of “It’s raining here” if you vary the context in which it is uttered.
Does that help?
Er… well, not yet, but might be a step towards helping.
I get that, if the conditions “different assessor” and “different context of utterance” are separable, then relativism makes distinct claims from contextualism. That is, if I have a different assessor but the same context (or even the same assessor whose epistemic standards have changed, and the same context), then contextualism asserts that the truth value of my claims is necessarily unchanged, and relativism asserts that it might change.
What I can’t fathom is how that happens, even in principle. Isn’t the assessor, and the assessor’s epistemic standards, part of the context of the utterance?
So imagine you read an ancient text in which the claim “the voice of Zeus follows upon his blows” appears as a description of the relation between thunder and lightening. THe assessor and facts about the assessor are nowhere part of the context of the utterance, because the utterance was made thousands of years before you were born.
An invariantist would say ‘that’s false, there’s no such thing as Zeus’.
A relativist would say ’That’s false to me (no Zeus), but it might have been true for the person who wrote it if they had different standards for truth.”
A contextualist would say ‘So Zeus doesn’t exist, but the voice and blows of Zeus are just terms for lightening and thunder. If someone made this comment knowing what we know about stoms, it would be false. But I assess this statement as true, because I take the utterer to be talking about lightening and thunder.’
(nods) I think I get it now… thanks! (More thoughts here)
The assessor doesn’t have to be a person standing there listening to the utterance. Suppose I told you that my friend Alice says that she knows OJ Simpson killed his wife, and I ask you what you think about her knowledge claim. If you were a relativist, you would evaluate the truth of the knowledge claim in accord with your epistemic standards, or you might even say, “Well, relative to standards X her knowledge claim is true, but relative to standards Y it’s false.”
If you were a contextualist, on the other hand, you’d ask me “In what context did she make this knowledge claim?” and then base your evaluation of the knowledge claim on my answer. You allow the context to set the epistemic standard you use for evaluation.
Another example: Suppose Bob says “Alice knows P” in one context, and Charlie says “Alice doesn’t know P” in another context. For a contextualist, it might be the case that Bob and Charlie are not disagreeing at all. If the contexts are sufficiently different, you can’t pit their knowledge claims against one another. A relativist, on the other hand, can pit the knowledge claims against one another, by relativizing them to the same epistemic standard. Only one of them will be true according to that standard.
Ah!
(lightbulb goes on)
Throughout, I have been implicitly understanding “context” to mean context of evaluation.
Which is not what we mean at all, we mean context of utterance.
Which, indeed, you even said explicitly, and I failed to read carefully enough.
Yes, this makes perfect sense.
Thinking about this now, I think I endorse contextualism, even though attempting to implement it gives me a headache. That is, whether I’m comfortable saying that you actually know X is a function of what evidence for and against X I believe you’re aware of, but my brain strongly tends to replace (my beliefs about) what evidence you’re aware of with what evidence I’m aware of.
I no longer remember what my vote was.
Thanks for your patience.
I’m not really sure why the distinction between contextualism and relativism makes a difference.
See here.
Basically, philosophers are sufficiently agreed on epistemology that both mean basically the same thing for the lay person’s understanding. There’s even a species of invariantism called “subject-sensitive invariantism” that is indistinguishable from contextualism to the uninitiated.
None of the prior discussion reflects an understanding of ‘contextualism’ as standardly conceived by philosophers (if the Stanford Encyclopedia exposition is representative of philosophers’ views). So I suspect the polling data for this question will need to be tossed out. Here’s a clearer explanation of the difference between these doctrines:
contextualism = The semantic thesis that ‘x knows y’ may vary in truth-value depending on the social and psychological status of the knowledge-attributor. I.e., ‘x knows y’ often or always fails to have a determinate truth-value, unless it is clear from context that we are really saying ‘x knows y relative to evaluator z,’ where z is someone evaluating ‘does x know y?’ Thus, a better name for ‘contextualism’ would be ‘attributor contextualism’ (which it has indeed been called).
Note that contextualism does not imply that the distribution of knowledge in the world is arbitrary or just a matter of subjective opinion; there may be very strict constraints on what sorts of ‘subjective opinions’ held by an evaluator affect knowledge-relative-to-an-evaluator. For instance, it is plausible that ‘I know I have hands’ would count as true if the evaluator were your psychiatrist, but would count as false if the evaluator were someone with whom you were debating the Simulation Hypothesis. That’s not because of the evaluator’s mere opinions; it’s because there are higher standards for knowledge in metaphysical debates than in everyday conversation. An evaluator with crazy, unrealistic standards wouldn’t have his/her own, equally legitimate beliefs about what counts as knowledge; s/he would just be consistently in error.
Nor is contextualism a meta-semantic claim about how the word ‘knowledge’ varies across linguistic communities; rather, it is the semantic claim that ‘knowledge’ in all (standard-English-speaking) contexts would frequently be judged to vary based on the state of the evaluator. Contextualism could turn out to be false for purely empirical reasons, if, say, sociological data proved that we don’t vary in knowledge-attribution based on the mental state and social context of the attributor.
relativism = The metaphysical thesis that knowledge as such is relative to a standard of assessment. Like contextualists, relativists think ‘know’ is three-place; but their relation is ‘x knows y according to standard z,’ not ‘x knows y relative to evaluator z.’ And whereas there are presumably facts about which agent is evaluating a knowledge-claim in the real world, there are no facts about which standard is the ‘right’ one; so there simply are no facts about knowledge, or even about knowledge-according-to-an-agent. What there are are facts about ‘what certain standards treat as being “knowledge”’.
I said that relativism is a ‘metaphysical’ view, not a semantic one. This is important. Contextualism can be refuted if it turns out that the English language is invariantist; but relativism can’t be so easily refuted, since their claim is not that we think of knowledge as relative, but that knowledge really is relative. Relativism is very close to radical skepticism, just with ‘knowledge’-talk preserved as a way of signaling one’s chosen standards. Whereas contextualism is just as opposed to skepticism as is invariantism. Speaking of which...
invariantism = The claim that we have knowledge of some things, combined with the semantic thesis that contextualism is false and the metaphysical thesis that relativism is false. According to an invariantist, ‘I know I have hands’ is either true or false simpliciter; evaluators and standards-of-evaluation might disagree about this statement’s truth-value, but that’s because some evaluators and some standards are wrong, not because ‘knowledge’ itself is unsaturated.
Source for all this: Rysiew, “Relativism and Contextualism”.
In your discussion of contextualism, you are conflating “evaluator” and “attributor”, I think. An attributor is someone who makes a knowledge-claim, i.e. attributes knowledge of some proposition to someone (including, possibly, to himself). An evaluator is someone who judges the truth of the knowledge-claim made by the attributor. So if you say “I know I have hands” to a psychologist, you are the attributor, not the psychologist. You are the one making the knowledge-claim (about yourself, in this case). The psychologist is the evaluator, and according to contextualism she will (or possibly should) evaluate your claim according to your context, not her own. So if the psychologist hears about you making the claim in the context of a discussion of the Simulation argument, she should probably judge it false, irrespective of the context in which she is situated at the time she is making the evaluation.
I believe this agrees more or less with the definition (and discussion) above. Your definitions of relativism and invariance seem to agree with mine.
I wasn’t aware that there was an established distinction between the two. Thanks for the information! Though nothing of great weight can rest on it, since:
Every attributor is a (self-)evaluator. Asserting ‘p’ is equivalent to asserting ‘p is true’.
Every evaluator is an attributor. To determine that some attributor’s knowledge-claim is true or false, one must oneself attribute knowledge (or lack thereof) to the relevant agent.
Yes. But if the psychologist evaluates your claim, by weighing in on its truth or falsehood, then the psychologist becomes a distinct attributor. I varied the psychologist or metaphysician as attributor, rather than paying much mind to self-attribution/self-evaluation, simply because I thought it would be less intuitive to talk about a person’s knowledge-claims failing to meet his or her own psychological/social state. But, sure, strictly speaking I could have just varied the psychological state of someone self-attributing knowledge, and thereby made that person’s own beliefs about his/her knowledge true or false. (At least, I think standard contextualist theories allow this.)
Interesting. I think it’s more complicated than that. For instance, I think contextualism predicts that the psychologist, in a later dinner conversation with a metaphysician friend, might say: ‘Earlier I told a patient that he knew he had hands; but, of course, really he doesn’t have hands.’ The contextualist interprets this as meaning that the psychologist’s state has importantly changed, hence her knowledge-attributions have changed, hence her knowledge-evaluations have changed. (Presumably part of the reason the psychologist’s knowledge-attributions have changed in this case is that she’s in a social context that includes a metaphysician with psychologically embedded ‘higher standards’. I.e., contextualism predicts that social overlap produces synchronizations in correct knowledge attribution.)
Note that an invariantist might interpret the same data very differently. A relatively skeptical invariantist could suggest that the psychologist was speaking loosely, not-quite-correctly, when she said ‘Yes, you have hands.’ Or a relatively Moorean invariantist could suggest that the psychologist became too hyperskeptical in the face of social pressure from the metaphysician. On the other hand, a relativist would suggest that there isn’t any determinate answer to whether ‘Yes, you have hands.’ was right, nor to whether ‘No, he didn’t have hands’ was. Even stipulating all the contextual facts underdetermines whether knowledge is present.
Lean towards contextualism, but with some problems. For instance:
“I know that I have hands” “I don’t know that I’m not a brain in a vat”
However, I’ve just asserted them side by side in the same context (of a Less Wrong discussion). And I don’t think relativism helps much either: can the assessor change their epistemic standards so quickly in the space of two consecutive sentences??
You’re allowed to be mistaken or lying. I suspect a contextualist would argue that exactly one of your assertions is true, depending on what the context of the discussion is.