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.
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.