Jonathan Ichikawa's Blog
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 assert p. [...]
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 following [...]
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, with [...]
Posted in Philosophy on Jun 21st, 2009
Matt Weiner argues that ‘our use of the word “know” is best captured by’ an inconsistent set of inference rules. His setup strikes me as strange. He writes:
These are the Knowledge Principles:
(Disquotational Principle) An utterance of “S knows that p” at time t is true iff at time t S knows-tenseless that p.
(Practical Environment Principle) [...]
Posted in publications on Jun 20th, 2009
Quantifiers, Knowledge, and Counterfactuals, forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
Many of the motivations in favor of contextualism about knowledge apply also to a contextualist approach to counterfactuals. I motivate and articulate such an approach, in terms of the context-sensitive ‘all cases’, in the spirit of David Lewis’s contextualist view about knowledge. The resulting view explains [...]
Posted in papers on Jun 20th, 2009
Quantifiers and Epistemic Contextualism, Version of 25 May, 2010. Forthcoming in Philosophical Studies.
I defend a neo-Lewisean form of contextualism about knowledge attributions. Understanding the context-sensitivity of knowledge attributions in terms of the context-sensitivity of universal generalizations provides an appealing approach to knowledge. Among the virtues of this approach are solutions to the skeptical paradox and [...]
Posted in Uncategorized on Jun 20th, 2009
I’m a postdoctoral research fellow at the Arché Philosophical Research Centre at the University of St Andrews. I’m working on the AHRC-funded ‘Intuitions and Methodology‘ project.
My Ph.D. was at Rutgers University.
My research so far has fallen broadly into three areas of focus (with vague boundaries and overlap): (i) questions in epistemology about knowledge, ‘knows’, safety [...]