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3rd Annual Northwestern/Notre Dame Epistemology Conference, April 14
“A Counter-Example to Contextualism about Justificatory Standards,” by Tim Loughlin
Comments by Torrey Wang
Thanks, Tom, for providing quite a stimulating read. These are my comments.
On page 3, you describe how S, who knows that, q, there is a power outage affecting the
floor in which she sees a red table, makes S’s doxastic justification with respect to her perceptual
belief, p, that she sees that red table, “more resilient.” This added resilience, you point out, comes
from the defeater that would be in her purview if she gained knowledge that sk, epistemology
experiments, which illuminate white tables with red lights, are being conducted throughout the
building. You say that that belief “puts S in a stronger epistemic position with respect to p.” You
then go on right away to say that this stronger position in which S is put “would not affect S’s actual
doxastic justification” for p.
Extending the foregoing to your main argument (pp. 6-9), then, i.e., to the “expanded airport
case” (5) I don’t see why one cannot say that Mary and John’s remaining in the same higher context
at t2 as at t1 destroys the passenger Smith’s doxastic justification at t2 for that context. To recap,
Smith’s knowledge that p, their plane will stop in Chicago, based on checking his itinerary, as you
describe it, is destroyed at t1 due to John and Mary’s raised standards. The lone difference between
the two is that due to the added attributors, Mary and John, Smith acquires information at t2 that
from Mary and John’s perspective has the potential to restore his lost epistemic standing relative to
his past knowledge as to p. According to Tom, the resolution expected of Smith by the contextualist
if Smith wants to restore his doxastic justification, and hence knowledge—that he cite what to him
seem irrelevant pieces of evidence, viz., that the itinerary is reliable, and that the airline agent has
personally confirmed that the schedule on it is accurate—is “unreasonable,” or amounts to
demanding that Tom be “unreasonable by his own lights.” Thus, in a variation on a question Tom
asks, if the fact that S would immediately see the relevance of the airline agent’s testimony to Smith’s
worry were he made aware of that worry is not enough to make what Mary and John say false, then
what would be” (8)?
I have two responses I would like to make. First, we should keep in mind, as Tom evidently
has, that contextualism evaluates whether a given subject knows a certain proposition p at the
metalinguistic level relative to an attributor. Given this usual assumption of truth-conditional
context-sensitivity that contextualists appeal to in order to explain the pull of skeptical arguments, it
shouldn’t be surprising that cases like the extension that Tom offers, wherein a subject of evaluation
can be said to both know and not know in different contexts, occur. Therefore, it would be a gross
confusion to think that just because S knows1 that p, that S does not know2 that p. Smith’s forming,
from his own perspective, the doxastically justified belief that he knows the plane will have a layover
in Chicago, and Mary and John’s forming, from their perspective, the doxastically justified belief that
Smith doesn’t know this, are both correct, and at the same time.
This is because there is no presumption as to whether Smith knows that the plane will stop
in Chicago because of privileged information that he has been given him by the airline agent. The
guiding assumption for them, instead, is that all Smith has to go on is a potentially outdated itinerary,
which, since it justifiably constitutes a defeater to Smith’s knowledge in their view, quite obviously
entails (on warrant closure across identical contexts) that Mary and John know that Smith lacks
adequate doxastic justification. This brings me to my second response.
A helpful way, I think, to illustrate the misdirection of Tom’s main objection is to turn
things on their head and focus instead on how Smith might ascribe knowledge to Mary and John, if
he knew about their doubts as to their itinerary’s reliability, keeping all other conditions in Tom’s
modified case fixed. Would Smith blithely insist then that were Mary and John to have his total
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3rd Annual Northwestern/Notre Dame Epistemology Conference, April 14
evidence at t1, they would know that p, the plane will stop in Chicago, based on his evidence? Clearly,
since he knows in this reversed scenario about Mary and John’s skeptical doubts, and not having
gotten the calls from his airline and travel agents yet at this point, he wouldn’t. What about at t2? In
one scenario, yes, viz., the scenario in which Mary and John have Smith’s total evidence at t1, but, in
addition to that, also the information that he receives at t2 verifying p from his travel and airline
agents. In the other scenario, no, viz., that in which Mary and John have as their evidence only what
Smith himself takes to be relevant evidence for p at t2, which is just his evidence at t1. This latter
scenario is of course at odds with Tom’s preferred description of what is going on when Smith, in
the modified case, is said to know at t2. But since at t2 Smith is said to not even know the relevant
relationship between the travel and airline agents’ testimonies and the truth of p relative to his own
context, and further, that John and Mary’s total evidence at t2 includes the agents’ testimonies, it
follows that if John and Mary do know p at t2, this is only because they know the relation that the
agents’ testimonies bear to p, which Smith doesn’t. So if we accept that contextualism properly
tracks changes in justificatory standards at t1, we should accept that it does so at t2 as well.
So, it seems to me that one example of the confusion exhibited here occurs when it is
suggested that contextualism somehow, by “demanding that Smith utilize information that is, from
his perspective, completely irrelevant to his belief that the plane will stop in Chicago to support that
belief in order to be doxastically justified relative to the context of Mary and John,” is guilty of
demanding that “Smith be unreasonable by his own lights” (9). Just because contextualism, when
idealized, requires that for Smith to be doxastically justified in a different, higher justificatory
standards context, that he demonstrate full reflective access to the pieces of knowledge relevant in
that context, doesn’t mean that contextualism requires him to do something against epistemic
principle when he fails to achieve such access.
What would seem to me to be a violation of epistemic principle instead is if a contextualist
allowed that an attributor A, upon discovering that a past subject S of a case of knowledgeascription regarding some proposition p at that time had possessed information unbeknownst to
him which could have influenced the actual ascription he gave her, that were he one day to decide to
reevaluate S’s same belief p, he could ignore the context-shift demanded by this new information (if
indeed that new information is truly salient). But, barring this discovery, contextualism provides a
perfectly reasonable explanation as to why strangers can utter truths about each other’s knowledge
claims without the full reflective access that contextualism, idealized, may enjoin. So, it seems that it
is only on account of the fact that John and Mary are stipulated as being walled off from
information that Smith has, which would have prompted them to render a different judgment at t2
had they known this, that lends this supposed counter-example its air of plausibility. But I take it
that the foregoing shows that the supporter of contextualism need only provide an error theory
similar to the one I have just given, which explains how wayward cases such as the one Tom
describes can happen, to successfully parry all such counter-examples.
The foregoing shows that the contextualist assumptions which generate this type of case are
no more problematic than those more familiar cases discussed and neutralized in Lewis, Cohen, etc.
For, according to these philosophers’ brands of contextualism, Smith would not be said not to know
p simpliciter at t2. From Smith’s own perspective, he knows that he knows, even though he fails to
realize Mary and John’s worry. However, for Mary and John, not overhearing what else Smith knows
which would make them ascribe knowledge to him if they had, the relevant alternative in their
evaluation of Smith’s knowledge-status—that the itinerary may be a misprint—is independent of the
correctness of their lack of full access into his total knowledge state. So, if we consider what
standards Smith must reach in order to eliminate the relevant alternative in Tom’s example, it may
be that even Smith’s supposed knowledge, transmitted by the airline agent, will be lost relative to
Mary and John once their skepticism has modulated to nonsatisfiable heights . Or, even if satisfiable,
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3rd Annual Northwestern/Notre Dame Epistemology Conference, April 14
as Tom envisions it by stipulating that Smith and the airline agent “have information that can dispel”
Mary and John’s worries, the knowledge state of an attributor and the factors salient to her
knowledge ascription nevertheless define what context the attributor takes herself to be in in the sort
of contextualism Tom argues against (as I understand it). Contextualism doesn’t require that for
proper knowledge-ascription to take place, attributors and subjects of knowledge ascription must be
“on the same page” in terms of full disclosure of the latter to the former as to what the contents of
their total evidence states are, and this for valid practical reasons. That it does is a mistaken
assumption, and proves contextualism’s point as to what makes for skepticism’s perennial appeal in
the first place. For these reasons, I think that Tom’s charge that the statement “Smith does not
know that the plane will stop in Chicago” is false when uttered by Mary and John at t2” (7) is false,
and so, if I am correct, so is his purported counter-example to justificatory standards contextualism.
In conclusion, my general diagnosis of the few problems that appear in this very thoughtful
piece by Tom Loughlin is that they seem to stem from confusing the role of an attributor A in
setting the bounds of justificatory standards that define a given case of knowledge ascription for a
subject S in that context with A’s determining what justificatory standards define S’s self-ascription
of knowledge in her own context. On standard construals of contextualism about justificatory
standards, A’s evaluation of S’s doxastic justification, and hence knowledge, may licitly come apart
from S’s evaluation of her own doxastic justification, and this without precluding S’s ability to set
the terms of her own contexts depending on her prevailing interests.1 Nevertheless, I think that it
would be especially interesting if Tom could come up with a counter-example to justificatory
standards contextualism as it applies to subjects who are themselves the attributors.
Bibliography
Cohen, Stewart. “Contextualism, Skepticism, and the Structure of Reasons.” Philosophical Perspectives
no. 13 (October 1999): 57-89.
DeRose, Keith. “The Problem with Subject-Sensitive Invariantism.” Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research 68, no. 2 (Mar., 2004): 346-50.
Klein, Peter D. “Contextualism and the Real Nature of Academic Skepticism.” Philosophical Issues 10
(2000): 108-16.
1 See some suggestions by Keith DeRose in his “The Problem with Subject-Sensitive Invariantism,” Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 68, no. 2 (Mar., 2004): 346-50.
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