CONTEXTUALISM, KRUGLANSKI’S PARADOX AND NATURALIZED EPISTEMOLOGY
Nikita Vladimirovich Golovko
Institute of Philosophy and Law of the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russia
Keywords: contextualism, knowledge ascription, psychological motivation, need for closure, cognitive social psychology, naturalization, A. Kruglanski, W. Quine
Abstract
This work aims to show that relying on A. Kruglanski’s concept of the need for closure and applying to the logic of naturalized epistemology we may come to a particular version of contextualism (D. Lewis, K. DeRos, S. Cohen, etc.) in which the tendency “to consider justification in non-epistemic terms” will not be perceived as something that is unconditionally opposed to the classical idea of epistemic normativity. Naturalization of epistemology assumes that “we study a person as a physical subject” (W. Quine), which makes it possible to freely appeal to the results of applied psychology. A. Kruglanski’s concept reveals the nature of the psychological “motivational component” of the subject ascribing knowledge, who is fundamentally in a situation in which “decision-making is determined by practical interests”. As a heuristic, examples traditional for contextualism are considered which illustrate that “knowledge ascription depends on how much is at stake”, both from the point of view of the subject making the decision and from the point of view of third parties ascribing knowledge to this subject. In our opinion, in all such examples, the subject will know. Only the “external” assessment of the psychological state of the subject changes (and this allows supporters of contextualism to say that in some situations the subject knows, and in others does not), but this is an error made by the observer, and not the subject ascribing knowledge.,
|
