CONTEXTUALISM, RELATIVISM, AND FACTIVITY. ANALYZING ‘KNOWLEDGE’ AFTER THE NEW LINGUISTIC TURN IN EPISTEMOLOGY

Abstract

The main goal of the so called “linguistic turn” in recent epistemology is to use linguistic data in order to gain new insights into epistemological problems and to defend or refute some epistemological positions. In particular, linguistic research into the semantics of knowledge attributions seems to provide a key to resolve some of the notorious problems with regard to knowledge, such as scepticism. A prominent example of this new linguistic turn in contemporary epistemology is the debate about the linguistic plausibility of epistemic contextualism. Contextualists appeal to linguistic intuitions in order to defend the thesis that the truth-conditions of knowledge ascriptions depend in a certain way upon the context in which they are uttered. However, there is no agreement among epistemologists about the semantic theory that best explains this context-dependency. According to one main version of contextualism, ‘know’ is construed as an indexical, whereas in contrastivism ‘know’ is interpreted as lexically ternary with a slot for a certain contrast proposition. In other nonindexical accounts ‘know’ expresses the same relation at every context of use, but the truth values of knowledge ascribing sentences depend on certain epistemic standards operant in the context of use. I will argue that contextualism, contrasitivism and many nonindexical accounts of knowledge, such as subject-sensitive invariantism, do not provide an adequate linguistic model for the semantics of knowledge ascriptions since they all fall short of a logical inconsistency in the form of the so-called factivity problem. I will further outline some important necessary conditions of a logical analysis of knowledge that explains the semantics of knowledge attributions in a way that resolves the factivity problem.