There is Some Truth in That

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, [...]

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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. [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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I’m an assistant professor in the philosophy department at the University of British Columbia. In 2011-12, I was a postdoc at UBC; before that, I was a postdoc at the Arché Philosophical Research Centre at the University of St Andrews. My Ph.D. is from Rutgers University. My research so far has fallen broadly into three areas of [...]

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