Philosophy of Religion Research

Epistemic Contextualism and Semantics of knowledge attributions

Editorial

Author

Instructor of Islamic Azad University, Science and Research Branch, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Epistemic Contextualism is a recent view in epistemology that has evolved primarily as a response to skepticism. Epistemic Contextualism is a semantic thesis and is the view that the truth conditions for knowledge attributions, sentences of the form “S knows that P” and “S doesn’t know that P”, can vary across contexts as a result of shifting epistemic standards. This view, in fact, is a linguistic turn in epistemology. Contextualist seeks to explained epistemological problems by semantics of knowledge sentences. In this paper I will examine one of the semantics foundations of Contextualism, that is epistemic standard as a unarticulated constituent, and will show that their epistemic claim is controversial and unpleasant.

Keywords

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Philosophy of Religion Research
Volume 7, Issue 1 - Serial Number 1
May 2009
Pages 35-66