Home – Home – Jornals – Philosophy of Sciences 2023 number 4

The paper aims to make a proper interpretation of the cases “Airport” by S. Cohen and “Bank” by K. DeRose as arguments for contextualism and against skepticism. At the time, D. Lewis set the main “paradigmatic” frame for modern contextualism: (a) fallibilism, (b) skepticism as a change of context, and (c) the emphasis on the need of pragmatic interpretation of the meaningfulness of statements, which is set by the “epistemic standard” that determines the strength of the “epistemic position” of the person attributing knowledge in a given context. Despite the fact that S. Cohen and K. DeRose describe different situations (in S. Cohen’s example we consider the situation of knowledge attribution not for a participant in the dialogue, but for a “third party”), for both examples we can offer a uniform interpretation, which, among other things, will explain why “epistemic standards” are different in different contexts. The basis for such an “interpretation” will be a specific psychological interpretation of condition (c) that describes the pragmatics of setting the meaningfulness of a statement in context. Forming his psychological “confidence” in P, the person will be guided by the limits after which “we are no longer forming belief, but already have a conviction” (J. Nagel) and “the degree of using the privileged information to predict a reaction of the other person” (E. Royzman et al.) that will operate differently from context to context. The essential point is that for such an approach to work, we should require that the causal structure of the subconscious processes that form a belief be isomorphic to the evidentialist structure of propositional justification. In our opinion, this is a much weaker assumption than the “we can know in everyday life” assumption that D. Lewis relied on in his own interpretation of contextualism.