Abstract
Do we need defeasible generalizations in epistemology, generalizations that are genuinely explanatory yet ineliminably exception-laden? Do we need them to endow our epistemology with a substantial explanatory structure? Mark Lance and Margaret Little argue for the claim that we do. I will argue that we can just as well do without them — at least in epistemology. So in the paper, I am trying to very briefly sketch an alternative contextualist picture. More specifically, the claim will be that although an epistemic contextualist should commit himself to epistemic holism he can nevertheless appeal to epistemic principles other than defeasible generalizations in order to provide his epistemology with a structure.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Dancy, J.: 1993, Moral Reasons, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford.
Dancy, J.: 2001, ‘Moral Particularism’, in E. N. Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (Summer 2001 Edition), URL = 〈http.//plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2001/entries/moral-particularism/〉.
Hooker, B.: 2000, ‘Moral Particularism: Wrong and Bad’, in B. Hooker and M. Little (eds.), Moral Particularism, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1–22.
Lance, M. and Little M.: 2004, ‘Defeasibility and the Normative Grasp of Context’, Erkenntnis 61, 435–455.
McDowell, J.: 1997, ‘Virtue and Reason’, in R. Crisp and M. Slote (eds.), Virtue Ethics, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 141–162.
Pollock, J.: 1986, Contemporary Theories of Knowledge, Rowman and Littlefield, Totowa NJ.
Stalnaker, R.: 1998, ‘On the Representation of Context’, Journal of Logic, Language, and Information 7; reprinted in Stalnaker, R.: 1999, Context and Content, Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 96–113.
Timmons, M.: 1996, ‘Outline of a Contextualist Moral Epistemology’, in W. Sinnott-Armstrong and M. Timmons (eds.), Moral Knowledge, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 293–325.
Williams, M.: 2001, Problems of Knowledge: A Critical Introduction to Epistemology, Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York.
Wittgenstein, L.: 1969, On Certainty, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
Wright, C.: Forthcoming, ‘Wittgensteinian Certainties’, in D. McManus, (ed.), Wittgenstein and Skepticism, Routledge, London and New York.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Kompa, N. (2004). Moral Particularism and Epistemic Contextualism: Comments on Lance and Little. In: Brendel, E., Jäger, C. (eds) Contextualisms in Epistemology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-3835-6_19
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-3835-6_19
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-3181-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-4020-3835-8
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)