Abstract
Recent epistemology makes knowledge context-relative in many and sundry ways. According to Wittgenstein, ordinary knowledge flows on a riverbed of givens (assumptions, presumptions, background beliefs, things taken for granted), none of which amount to knowledge. Such convictions may be regarded as “beyond being justified or unjustified, as it were, as something animal” (On Certainty, par. 359). They provide me with “the substratum of all my enquiring and asserting (par. 162).” This substratum is not accepted on the basis of reasoning. “No: it is the inherited background against which I distinguish between true and false (par. 94).”
Reprinted by permission of the author and the editors from Philosophical Perspectives 2, Epistemology (1988) 139–155.
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Notes
“Skepticism, Relevant Alternatives, and Deductive Closure,” Philosophical Studies 29 (1976) 249–61.
Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 159.
Ibid., p.174.
“A Contextualist Theory of Epistemic Justification”, American Philosophical Quarterly 15 (1978) 213–19. Also in Paul Moser (ed.), Empirical Knowledge (Totowa, NJ: Rowan & Littlefield, 1986).
Compare here Marshall Swain’s “Revisions of ‘Knowledge, Causality, and Justification’,” in M. Swain and G. Pappas (eds.), Essays on Knowledge and Justification (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978).
Also Fred Dretske’s “The Pragmatic Dimension of Knowledge,” Philosophical Studies 40 (1981) 363–78.
For a review of the appeal to relevant alternatives, see also Palle Yourgrau’s “Knowledge and Relevant Alternatives,” Synthese 55 (1983) 175–190. We shall return to this appeal below.
The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984).
Ibid.
“Knowledge and Context,” The Journal of Philosophy 83 (1986) 574–584.
“How Do You Know?” American Philosophical Quarterly, XI, 2(April, 1974): 113–122; also in G. Pappas and M. Swain, eds. Essays on Knowledge and Justification (Ithaca, NY.: Cornell, 1978). esp. sec. II. According to that paper, the relativity of knowledge to an “epistemic community” is brought out most prominently by the requirement that inquirers have at least normal cognitive equipment (e.g., normal perceptual apparatus, where that is relevant)” (117). The reference to perception is explicitly illustrative, since the same sorts of consideration apply to other cognitive equipment-e.g., reason and memory -as Cohen has well made explicit.
Skepticism is discussed further in my “The Skeptic’s Appeal,” forthcoming in Theory of Knowledge: the State of the Art, ed. by Marjorie Clay and Keith Lehrer.
See Plato’s Republic, Bk. I, 352.
The theme of this paragraph is developed in section B4 of my “Beyond Skepticism, to the Best of Our Knowledge,” Mind(1988).
For more on the concept of epistemic justification and doubt that it can serve all the purposes which epistemology has given it, see my “Methodology and Apt Belief,” forthcoming in Synthese (1988), a special issue on epistemology, edited by Steven Luper-Foy.
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Sosa, E. (1990). Knowledge in Context, Skepticism in Doubt: The Virtue of Our Faculties. In: Roth, M.D., Ross, G. (eds) Doubting. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 48. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-1942-6_14
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