Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa
Posted in papers, Philosophy on Oct 18th, 2011
I have completed a draft of a new short discussion piece on Michael Blome-Tillmann’s (2009) Mind paper, “Knowledge and Presuppositions”. It is essentially a development of this blog post from a year and a half ago. (I’d forgotten about it, to be honest — I rediscovered it as I finished drafting.) My new paper: Ignorance [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Nov 18th, 2010
A conversation last night with Yuri and Andy helped me to get clearer on the argument I was trying to press in my last post. Here’s the much more succinct way to make the point. It’s an argument against forms of contextualism that put relevant alternatives into the proposition expressed by knowledge attributions. Suppose I’m [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Nov 17th, 2010
Suppose you agree with Jonathan Schaffer that ‘knows’ takes an extra argument place, and that variation in what fills this slot explains the context-sensitivity of ‘S-knows-that-p’ attributions. Knowledge relates, say, a subject, a proposition, and, let’s call it, the ‘epistemic standard’. Nothing yet is assumed about what sort of thing that is. Schaffer thinks the epistemic [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Nov 14th, 2010
One of the questions I’ve been thinking about lately (unrelated to most of my recent blog posts) concerns the best linguistic implementation of contextualism about ‘knows’. I’ve committed myself to contextualism in a couple of papers, but so far I have tried to avoid a commitment to any particular semantic treatment of ‘knows’. I take [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Sep 8th, 2010
I like the approach to counterfactuals that treats them as modals. The sentence ‘if A were the case, C would be the case’ says that, out of some restricted class of possibilities, all the A possibilities are C possibilities. Which restricted class is in play is of course in part a context-sensitive matter. The relevant [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Apr 16th, 2010
In a recent paper in Mind, Michael Blome-Tillmann defends a form of ‘knows’ contextualism that is broadly Lewisean. His project is, in its broad forms, very similar to that in one of my forthcoming papers. In my paper, I argue that Lewis’s particular suggested rules for proper ignoring are inessential to the central contextualist insight, [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Mar 12th, 2010
I’m going to be discussing an argument that I know Jason Stanley to have given, but I’m away from my copy of his book at the moment, so I can’t cite it properly, or check and see who else has discussed it (or even whether it’s original to Jason). I’ll follow up if citation protocol [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Feb 25th, 2010
The idea that knowledge entails certainty is a very intuitive one. It’s easy to forget this, because most of us have it drilled into us, early in our epistemological careers, that embracing a certainty requirement on knowledge leads to skepticism, and we’re rightly convinced that skepticsm is crazy, so we start getting used to the [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Feb 23rd, 2010
What should a contextualist who likes normative principles involving ‘knows’ say? Signing up to the knowledge norms means embracing something typically expressed by sentences fitting something like this schema: (N) Iff S knows p, then S is permitted to phi Some candidates for phi: S believe p; S rely on p in practical reasoning; S [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Dec 7th, 2009
Here is a draft of a review of Keith DeRose’s new book. Comments welcome.
Posted in Philosophy on Nov 24th, 2009
It’s a little bit natural to think that ‘knows’ contextualism and the shifty kind of invariantist that’s sometimes called an ‘SSI theorist’ or an ‘IRI theorist’ come to a bit of an intuitive draw considering two kinds of third-person knowledge attributions. High Howie has whatever features you think makes it harder to know, or makes [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Oct 26th, 2009
Elusive There. Try to go there, and straightaway it disappears. That is how walking destroys there.
Posted in Philosophy on Oct 25th, 2009
John Hawthorne gives an argument that contextualists about knowledge face considerable pressure to be contextualists about terms that refer to things widely thought to be linked to knowledge, like ‘is epsitemically permitted to assert’ or ‘relies inappropriately upon in one’s practical reasoning’. I’m inclined to agree. He argues, however, that it’s not at all plausible [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Oct 23rd, 2009
Here’s an insanely simple argument for contextualism about knowledge. I think it’s sound, although I’m not sure I’d expect many people to be persuaded by it. I’d be interested in hearing about how readers might think it best to resist it. Here’s premise one. Epistemic modals are intimately connected to knowledge in something like the [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Jul 25th, 2009
In his 2002 paper “Assertion, Knowledge, and Context,” Keith DeRose gave an argument for contextualism about ‘knows’ that took basically this form: knowledge is the norm of assertion; assertability varies according to context; therefore, knowledge varies according to context. This was a pretty confused argument — though of course this is much clearer in retrospect, [...]