Cervelli, Persone e Società ***ABSTRACTS
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Brains, Persons, and Society *** ABSTRACTS Cervelli, Persone e Società ***ABSTRACTS |
Marina
Sbisà
Department
of Philosophy,
Knowledge
attribution and contextualism
1. The
aim of this paper is to reflect
on our conception of knowledge by considering the practice of knowledge
attribution. The verb "to know", as well as its cognates in languages
other than English, has frequent second person occurrences. This fact
is
revealing with respect to the functions that knowledge-talk is designed
to play
in face-to-face communication as well as in society. These functions,
in turn,
uncover interesting features of our conception of knowledge.
I examine three second person uses of
"know", namely: (1) "you know that" or "As you
know...," as used to introduce presupposed information; (2)
parenthetical
or tag "you know"; (3) "you know" as used while assessing
one's interlocutor's behavior. In cases (1) and (2) the addressee is
attributed
knower status: he or she is acknowledged as being in a position to
felicitously
issue an assertion that p, that is, a finding that p, based on criteria
and
licensing inferences. Correspondingly, p is placed in a "space of
reasons" and is granted knowledge status. In case (3), knowledge is not
attributed to the addressee as a status but as a de facto
competence to speak and act successfully. Such a
competence is no felicity condition: if someone fails to possess it,
his or her
action or speech act is in general not at risk of being "null and
void", but unsuccessful or incorrect or (in the case of assertion)
false.
On the one hand, knowledge as a status may be
(in part) a matter of agreement. It is a matter of agreement, at least
in part,
whether a speaker has contributed a piece of knowledge to our shared
cognitive
world, and also, whether his or her utterance really counts as an
assertion:
when an assertion is issued by someone who recognizedly is in a
position to
make that assertion, and there is no reason to doubt the truth of what
he or
she says, what is asserted counts as knowledge whether it is in fact
(unknown
to us) ultimately reliable or not. Conditions for speaker entitlement
and rules
of commitment connected to knower status contribute to the normative
aspect of
knowledge.
But knowledge attribution is defeated when the
alleged knower does not face up to the world successfully enough and
his or her
competence to speak and act proves flawed and therefore unreliable. In
such
cases we deny that the subject "really knew" that p and this shows
that, to the aim of knowledge attribution, the reliability-related
aspect of knowledge
prevails over the status-related whenever the former overtly fails.
The reliability-related and the status-related
aspect of knowledge are connected to each other because knowledge does
not
enjoy "luminosity" (T. Williamson, Knowledge and its limits,
Oxford University Press 2000), i.e. we
cannot always know whether we know. So, intersubjective agreement about
knower
and knowledge status is often the best way we have (albeit an indirect
one) to
approach reliability issues.
Considering
cases in which this seems to be so, though, it is reasonable to wonder
whether
this apparent context-relativity is a matter of the relative height of the relevant standards for
knowledge, as has been claimed by several contextualists, or a matter
of the
greater salience of either aspect of knowledge discussed in this paper.
I
describe two opposed scenarios, associated with scepticism and with
scientific
research respectively, according to this proposal. In the former, there
may be
knowledge according to reliability (we may in fact know that these are
our
hands, etc...), but not (at least in the sceptic's opinion) according
to
entitlement. In the latter, there is knowledge as entitlement (if the
scientist
were not entitled to issue assertions about the subject matter of
his/her
scientific research, who else would be?), but it is all to be seen how
reliable
the scientist's claim eventually proves.
My conclusion is contextualist as to the truth/falsity assessment of knowledge attributions: we do not assess them against entire possible worlds (circumstances), but against contexts (sets of pertinent facts selected by the ongoing activity). I suggest a specific factor, the reliability-status duality, which affects the assessment of knowledge attributions. But I do not suggest that "know" should be held to possess different meanings in different contexts: whenever we use "know" the same (complex) lexical entry is activated.