Contextualism and Disagreement

• Authors: Wang Qin
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This paper argues that attributor contextualism is in conflict with ordinary language methodology. Attributor contextualism has at its center the thesis that, the truth-values of knowledge attributions vary with the conversational (speaker) contexts. This thesis entails that if two speakers in similar contexts make conflicting knowledge attributions, at least one of these attributions is false. One important argument for attributor contextualism depends on ordinary language methodology, a methodology that places great trust in ordinary speakers and prevents judging a substantial group of ordinary speakers' simple knowledge attributions false. I argue that there is strong empirical evidence that ordinary speakers do extensively disagree in similar contexts. My conclusion is that one cannot coherently hold the attributor contextualist thesis and use ordinary language methodology, because the lesson we learn from the empirical evidence is that using the methodology would prove the thesis false. Since prominent attributor contextualists explicitly adopt the methodology, and that the methodology is what distinguishes attributor contextualism from its main rival, invariantism, the conflict with the methodology is a problem for attributor contextualism.

Keywords

EN

attributor contextualism; ordinary language; disagreement

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Journal: Lodz Papers in Pragmatics
• Year: 2011
• Volume: 7
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 309-322

Dates

published

2011-01-01

online

2012-01-05

Contributors

author

Wang Qin

• The University of Hong Kong

References

• Chrisman, Matthew. 2007. From epistemic contextualism to epistemic expressivism. Philosophical Studies 135(2): 225-254.[WoS]
• Cohen, Stewart. 1999. Contextualism, skepticism, and the structure of reasons. Philosophical Perspectives 13: 57-89.
• Cohen, Stewart. 2001. Contextualism defended: Comments on Richard Feldman's skeptical problems, contextualist solutions. Philosophical Studies 103(1): 87-98.[Crossref]
• Cullen, Simon. 2010. Survey-Driven Romanticism. Review of Philosophy and Psychology 1(3): 275-296.
• DeRose, Keith. 1995. Solving the skeptical problem. Philosophical Review 104(1): 1-52.[Crossref][WoS]
• DeRose, Keith. 1999. Contextualism: An explanation and defense. In: John Greco and Ernest Sosa (eds.), The Blackwell Guide to Epistemology. Blackwell Publishing, 187-205.
• DeRose, Keith. 2008. What's Wrong with Experimental Philosophy. In: Certain Doubts. Retrieved May 24, 2010, from
• DeRose, Keith. 2009. The Case for Contextualism. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• Haberstroh, Susanne, Daphna Oyserman, Norbert Schwarz, Ulrich Kühnen and Li-Jun Ji. 2002. Is the interdependent self more sensitive to question context than the independent self? Self-construal and the observation of conversational norms. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 38(3): 323-329, doi:10.1006/jesp.2001.1513.[Crossref]
• Holbrook, Allyson L., Jon A. Krosnick, David Moore and Roger Tourangeau. 2007. Response order effects in dichotomous categorical questions presented orally: the impact of question and respondent attributes. The Public Opinion Quarterly 71(3): 325-348.[Crossref]
• Johnson, Timothy, Patrick Kulesa, Isr Llc, Young I. Cho and Sharon Shavitt. 2005. The relation between culture and response styles: evidence from 19 countries. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 36(2): 264-277, doi:10.1177/0022022104272905.[Crossref]
• Krosnick, Jon A. 1999. Survey research. Annual Review of Psychology 50(1): 537-567.[Crossref][WoS][PubMed]
• Lewis, David. 1996. Elusive knowledge. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74(4): 549-567.[Crossref]
• Weinberg, Jonathan M., Shaun Nichols and Stephen Stich. 2001. Normativity and epistemic intuitions. Philosophical Topics 29(1-2): 429-460.[Crossref]
• Welkenhuysen-Gybels, Jerry, Jaak Billiet and Bart Cambre. 2003. Adjustment for acquiescence in the assessment of the construct equivalence of Likert-type score items. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 34(6): 702-722, doi:10.1177/0022022103257070.[Crossref]

Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/v10016-011-0017-2