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Philosophy and Phenomenological ResearchVol. LXII, No. 2, March 2001

Contextualist Swords, SkepticalPlow shares*

B R E W C. JOHNSEN

Universily of Houston

Radical skepticism, the view that no human being has any contingent knowl-edge of any external world there may be, has few adherents these days. But

many who reject it concede that such skeptical arguments as SA require some

sort of response, since they are obviously valid and their premises are, at thevery least, highly plausible:

S A : (1 ) I do not know not-ED (that I am not the victim of massivedeception by an Evil Demon);

(2) If I do not know not-ED, then I do not know W (where W is any

apparently obvious contingent proposition about the externalworld, e.g., that I am sitting in a chair);

Hence,(3) I do not know W.

In this paper I consider two responses which are usefully thought of as vari-ants of a single view called “contextualism”, and argue that neither issuccessful.

To a first approximation, and running roughshod over some importantdifferences, both sorts of theorists hold that the truth conditions for knowl-edge claims vary with context, and that in contexts in which skepticalhypotheses are being taken seriously those conditions are so stringent thatSA’s premises, and hence its conclusion, will count as true. But this fact,they argue, carries no implications for the truth of knowledge claims made inordinary contexts, where the conditions are much more relaxed; in such

contexts, they hold, many knowledge claims are true.The central difference between the two responses lies in their accounts of

what exactly it is whose variability accounts for the fact that a knowledge~~ ~

*I am grateful to Keith DeRose and others who commented on ancestors of this paper pre-sented at the University of Houston, to DeRose and Fred Dretske for their comments on acomplete draft, and to an anonymous referee for this journal. As usual, I am indebtedabove all to Roger Wertheirner for h is trenchant and constructive c riticism .

CONTEXTLJALIST SWORDS. KEPTICAL PLOWSHARES 385





Nearly enough, ED could not be a live hypothesis at all unless El were true,and the fact that contextualists concede E l and E2 is what accounts for theiraccepting, or at least acknowledging the plausibility of, premise (1) of SA.

One expository matter requires brief attention. Contextualists oftensuggest that the skeptic can literally make his denials of knowledge t rue .

DeRose says, for example, that when such a denial is true, it is so onlybecause the skeptic “manipulates the semantic standards for knowledge,thereby creating a context in which (it is truer ’ (4; my emphasis). DavidLewis makes a similar claim when he endorses the following Rule of Rela-tive Modality:

R R M : If a remark is made which requires that a certain possibility be[considered] which has hitherto been ignored, then the boundarybetween the [considered] and the ignored possibilities shifts outwardso as to make what was said true (my emphases).“

But a skeptic’s claiming that demon deception is a possibility which must betaken into account cannot make it a genuine possibility, any more than mysetting a sufficiently low standard of precision for hexagonality can makeFrance hexagonal. If my claim that France is hexagonal is true, its truth isdue both to my low standard and to the shape of France. Analogously, if theskeptic’s claim is true, its truth is due both to the standard being employed

for determining what counts as a possibility, and to the fact that demondeception is a genuine possibility.Perhaps DeRose and Lewis are clear about this, and guilty only of having

written somewhat carelessly. At a minimum, however, they insist that askeptic, at least if he plays his cards well, can raise the standard fo r the truthof knowledge claims, and thereby insure that his exotic possibilities-giventhat they are genuine-must be taken into account. There are major disagree-ments among contextualists concerning the means by which this can beaccompli~hed,~ ut the matter has little if any relevance to the attack on skep-

justification and the like-will simply dismiss E l and E 2as irrelevant, and concede themonly in the sense of not dispu ting them. In contrast, an internalist cont extu alist will con -cede both their truth and their relevance. For a thorough recent discussion of the bearingof the externalisdinternalism issue on skepticism, see Richard Fumerton’sMetaepiste-mulugy and Skepticism Lanham, Maryland: Row man& Littlefield, 1995).Lewis, David, “Scorekeeping in a Language Game,” inhis Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1

(New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); 233-49. Lewis actually con-trasts “relevant” and “ignored”, but this usage renders incoherent the idea that someonemight ign ore a relevant possibility. Fortunately, my point in the main text doe s not dependon m y suggested revision, since Lewis willingly accepts this con sequ ence; see the follow-ing note. Subsequent parenthetical page references to Lewis refer to this paper.Thus DeRose, for example, concedes that a skeptic’s hypotheses must be “inserted into aconversation in the righr way” if they are to becom e relevant(15, n. 22; my emphasis),while the Lewis of “Elusive Knowledge”(Australasian Journal of Philosophy. 74 (1996).549-67) will have none of this: “If you bring some hitherto ignored possibility toour

CONTEXTUALIST SWORDS. SKEPTICAL PLOWSHARES 387



ticism. For purposes of refuting the skeptic, what contextualists need toshow is only that the fact that there are some contexts in which his sweepingdenials of knowledge are true is perfectly compatible with there being othercontexts in which ordinary knowledge claims are true; accordingly, I shalllargely ignore their proposals concerning standard-raising mechanisms.

I divide my discussion into four parts. In Section I, I argue that ES-theorycan provide no response to skepticism and, along the way, rectify somemisconceptions about skepticism. In Section 11, I defend RA-theory againstan importantly mistaken criticism, but also identify a serious problem withi t ; I also rectify further misconceptions about skepticism. In Section 111, Ipropose a version of RA-theory which is free of the problem identified inSection 11, embodies all of the contextualists’ important insights, andpossesses numerous other strengths. Finally, in Section IV, I argue that this

theory provides no basis for a response to skepticism.

I

All contextualists deploy the notion of varying standards for the truth ofknowledge claims, but to my knowledge DeRose is the only one to character-ize this variation simply in terms of a scale of epistemic strength, and toabjure any attempt to explicate that notion in terms of relevant alternatives orcompeting possibilities. In assessing ES-theory I shall therefore focus on hisaccount.

The core components of ES-theory may be put as follows: (i) the degreeof epistemic strength required-the standard-for the truth of knowledgeclaims varies with the speaker’s conversational context; (ii) when skepticalclaims such as premise (1) of SA are true, they are so only because they aremade in contexts in which the standard is high; hence, (iii) the truth of suchskeptical claims has no implications for the truth of ordinary knowledgeclaims made in contexts in which the standard is low.

A fourth component of DeRose’s account is adapted from Robert Nozick?

SCA: We tend to judge that S doesn’t know that P when we think that Swould believe P even if P were false (so that S’s belief is“insensitive”).

Expressed in terms of possible-worlds semantics, SCA says that we tend tojudge that S does not know P if S believes P in any of the nearest not-P

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attention, then straightway we are not ignoring it at all ..., [and] no matter how far-fetched a possibility may be, ... if ... we are not in fact ignoring it ..., then for us now it is arelevant alternative.”Nozick’s views are set forth in his Philosophical Explanarions (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 1981). especially pp. 167-228.

BRED0 C. JOHNSEN



worlds (worlds in which P is false). Taking a cue from SCA, DeRoseproposes the following Rule of Sensitivity:

RS: A claim, that S knows P, is true if and only if S’s belief that Ptracks the truth of P through that sphere of possible worlds,

surrounding and including the actual world, through which it isrequired to do so by the contextually relevant standard for the truth ofknowledge claims, which sphere includes at least the nearest not-Pworlds.

(S’s belief that P tracks the truth of P through a given sphere of possibleworlds if and only if S believes P in all of the P-worlds, and does not believeP in any of the not-P worlds, within that sphere.) Turning now to argumentSA, RS has the consequence that, in any context governed by the skeptic’s

high standard for the truth of knowledge claims, a claim that S knows W willbe true only if S does not believe W in the nearest possible worlds in whichED is true; hence it implies that no such claim will be true in such a context,since S does believe W in the nearest possible worlds in which ED is true.But that fact has no implications for the truth or falsity of most claims toknow W, which are made in contexts in which the relevant standard is not theskeptic’s and the sphere of possible worlds through which S’s belief musttrack the truth does not include worlds in which ED is true?

Although DeRose defends RS, he regards both it and SCA as havingexceptions, and in trying to explain why those exceptions do not disqualifyRS from playing an important theoretical role he reveals two importantmisconceptions concerning skepticism. In his view, RS and SCA get thingswrong with respect to the “weak skeptical hypothesis” that I falsely believethat I have hands; according to him, I know that hypothesis to be false(contrary to RS), and there is little if any tendency to deny that I do so(contrary to SCA), in spite of the fact that my belief in its falsity is insensi-

~

’ Despite the affinity between SCA andRS, Nozick and DeRose hold radically differentviews. Nozick is not a contextualist, butan “invariantist”; on his view, thereis an unvary-ing set of necessary and sufficient conditions forS’s knowing P (or for the truth of anyclaim that S knows P), namely, that S’s belief track the truthof P hrough that sphere ofpossible worlds surrounding and including the actual world which includes the nearestworlds in which P is false. This has the consequence that w hat DeRosecalls “the abom-inable conjunction” is possible:S does not know not-ED, but he does know W. DeRoseoffers no account at all of the con ditions forS’s knowing P, but rather an account of thetruth conditions for knowledgeclaims though it is implicit in his account that it is a neces-sary condition for the truth of any know ledge claim that the subject’s belief h avesomedegree of epistemic strength). While his account does not imply the possibility of theabominable conjunction, it does of course have the consequence that “[Olne speakermay truthfully ascribe knowledge of a fact toa subject. while another speaker may truth-fully deny that the same subject knows that very fact.” See his “Contextualism” in TheEncyclopedia of Philosophy Supplement, Borchen, Donald M., ed. (NewYork: imon &Schuster M acmillan, 1996). 1 1-13.




tive. He argues, however, that these exceptions do not prevent RS fromexplaining our judgments concerning “strong” skeptical hypotheses, andsuggests that the problem with “weak” ones is that

they don’t give us much of an idea of how I come to have the false belief they assign to me.Hypotheses are supposed to explain; skeptical hypotheses should explain how we might cometo believe something despite its being false (23).

First, what skeptical hypotheses are supposed to explain, and do in factexplain, is my having the experiences I do. While it is true that the putative“simple false belief hypothesis” does not meet this requirement, that isbecause it is not a skeptical hypothesis at all, but rather a minor consequenceof typical skeptical hypotheses, e.g., that I am being massively deceived byan Evil Demon, that I am a brain in a vat, and the like. A skeptical hypothe-sis is an alternative to our standard hypothesis that extra-experiential reality ismore or less as we take i t to be, and the closest thing to a “simple falsebelief’ hypothesis in the skeptical armamentarium is the hypothesis that myexperiences are a dreamlike illusion bearing no relation to any extra-experien-tial reality. By DeRose’s criterion, this should be a weak hypothesis, since itoffers no explanation of how I have come to have my many false beliefsabout physical objects, yet it is surely “stronger” than the “simple falsebelief’ non-hypothesis; the reason for this is that it is a kind of “umbrella”hypothesis, according to which my experiences are explained by something

other than the normally posited interaction with a physical universe, much asthe content of ordinary dreams is explained (for the most part) by somethingother than such (direct) interaction.

Even DeRose’s own example of a particularly egregious “weak” hypothe-sis-that I am a massively deceived intelligent dog (in a world otherwise likethe one we take ourselves to inhabit)-counts as a legitimate skepticalhypothesis, since it provides a radically different account, compatible with therelevant data, of what reality may be like, and has implicit in it the idea that

my experiences are explained by bizarre perceptualkonceptual interactionsbetween my canine self and my environment. Why, then, does it seem“weak” (if it does) in comparison with the classical skeptical hypotheses? Theprincipal reason, I suggest, is a phenomenon of little philosophical interest:the apparently “stronger” classical hypotheses are simply those which, forwhatever reason, seem at least to be more readily imagined; hence they morereadily induce us to take seriously the unadorned skeptical possibility thatreality is radically unlike what we take it to be. No doubt there are good psy-chological and heuristic reasons for philosophers’ having occupied themselveswith demons and envatted brains to the exclusion of intelligent dogs; but thephilosophically important feature of all skeptical hypotheses is simply that

390 BREDOC. JOHNSEN



they are empirically adequate alternatives to our standard hypothesis, and onthis score SCA and RS give exactly the right resuk8

DeRose also misrepresents the skeptic’s position when he faults thatphilosopher for failing to explain “how we might come to believe somethingdespite its being false”; the implication that the skeptic is obliged to supply

such an explanation is simply mistaken. Since genuine hypotheses do notfollow from the data they purport to explain, no explanation is required ofanyone of how we might go wrong in adopting one; hence no explanation isrequired of how, in particular, we may have gone wrong in adopting ourcommonsense view of the world rather than, say, ED. It is not as though theskeptic holds that (many of) our beliefs arefalse; his quarrel is with the ideathat we know that they are true.

We may now turn to our central concern-the anti-skeptical potential ofES-theory-and here our first task is to come to terms with the fact that, as

stated, the theory applies only to (conversational) knowledge claims. Sinceall radical skeptical problems are ultimately first-personal-“Do I know, andif so how, that I am not a victim of an evil demon, or a brain in a vat”?-theES-theorist needs to show how his conversationally oriented theory can bemade relevant to SA at all. Of the two ways in which DeRose suggests thatthis can be done, I shall consider only the first, since it most closely parallelshis treatment of the conversational case, and the second provides no advantageover it:

[I]t can be maintained that different standards for knowledge govern the truth conditions ofour rhoughrs regarding what is and is not known just as different standards govern the truthconditions of what is said regarding knowledg e (7).

DeRose here proposes something like the following principle:

ES,: If S has a true thought that P, and she thinks that she knows that P,then how strong an epistemic position she must be in with respectto P for the latter thought to be true can vary with other features ofher thought.

ES, implies that if S should think that she knows W on some occasion whenthe relevant standard for the truth of those thoughts is the skeptic’s, shewould be mistaken; whenever that standard is relevant, which we may simplysuppose to include any occasion on which she is contemplating SA, she canonly properly conclude that she knows neither not-ED nor W. Of course,*

DeRo se’s distinction between weak and strong hypotheses arises originally in connectionwith his reflections on th e conversational mechanisms by which skeptics (threaten to)raise the standard for the truth of knowledge claims. In that context, the mark of a“weak” hypothesis is precisely the psychologically relevant, but philosophically irrele-vant, fact that appealing to i t is unlikely to induce one’s interlocutors to acquiesce inone’s attempt to raise the standard.

CONTEXTUALISTSWORDS. KEPTICAL PLOWSHARES 391





To see that this account fails to respond to the skeptical challenge oneneed only note that the skeptic i s perfectly prepared to acknowledge that manybeliefs may satisfy DeRose’s conditions for having substantial epistemicstrength, and to agree as well, therefore, that many knowledge claims maysatisfy his conditions for the truth of such claims. [n fact, the skeptic goes

even further; he positively concurs in many of DeRose’s claims. In consider-ing a potential charge of having begged the question against the skeptic,DeRose says,

[I]n claiming that my belief that I have hands is sensitive. I betray my conviction that I’m not a[brain in a vat] .... [A]s I firmly believe, I’m not a [brain in a vat] .... [[It’s legitimate to pointout that [these beliefs] militate against [the skeptic’s] position, and ask why we should givecredence to just those that favor him . (50)

But these beliefs do not militate against the skeptic’s position; neither theirtruth, nor even their being held-truthfully or not-by the skeptic himself, isinconsistent with that position. Since the skeptic is not ips0 fact0 a freak ofHumean nature, he typically has a full range of beliefs about quotidianmatters; what distinguishes him from others is not a lack of beliefs, but aparticular belief, namely, that none of us knows any of his contingent objec-tive beliefs to be true.’” A skeptic who is eating breakfast will typicallybelieve both that he is doing so, and that he believes that he is doing so;

further, he will believe that he would be holding that belief even if the world

were different in various ways-if the sky were less cloudy, or he were usinga different fork, or ... ; and finally, he will believe that if he were not eatingbreakfast then he would not believe that he was doing so. In short, he willbelieve that his belief tracks the truth throughout a substantial sphere ofnearby possible worlds. Not only, then, will the skeptic not deny that hemeets DeRose’s conditions for truthfully claiming to know that he is eatingbreakfast (and Nozick’s conditions for knowing that he is), but he willbelieve that he does meet them. In particular, it should be noted, he wouldhold the two beliefs whose endorsement constitutes the core of DeRose’sputatively anti-skeptical response to SA, viz., (i ) that his belief that W tracksthe truth of W through a sphere of possible worlds surrounding the actualworld and including the nearest not-W worlds, and (ii) that his belief that not-ED does not track the truth of not-ED through any sphere of possible worldswhich includes the nearest ED-worlds (since by hypothesis he believes not-ED in those worlds). I repeat: what distinguishes the skeptic is his additionalbelief that none of his contingent objective beliefs, including his beliefs thatW is true and that (i) holds, constitutes knowledge.

‘I’ Whether the skeptic’s holding all of these beliefs shows that his arguments are mistakenor ineffectual, or that he is somehow himself intellectually defective-irrational,perhaps-are large questions which I cannot address here except to say that the answerin each case is “No”.






beg the question, or (iib) he must appeal to some argument-old or new-against E l or E2, once again forgoing the possibility of refuting the skepticsolely on contextualist grounds. Thus ES-theory can provide no independent,self-contained response to skepticism.

I1

According to RA-theory, the necessary and sufficient conditions for the truthof a claim that S knows P are that S’s evidential state eliminates all the rele-vant alternatives to S’s true belief that P. I choose this Dretskean formulation

for several reasons: it is intrinsically plausible, it captures the central ideacommon to all variants of the theory, it leaves open two divisive questions-

what determines the relevance of an alternative, and what is required for anevidential state to eliminate an alternative-and it provides the framework for

a version of RA-theory which I shall eventually defend.On this view knowledge is a relationally absolute concept:

Absolute concepts [e.g., flatness, emptiness and knowledge] depict a situation as beingcompletely devoid of a certain sort of thing: bumps in the case of flatness and objects in thecase of emptiness [and uneliminated relevant alternatives in the case of knowledge] (366).

The relativity of such concepts consists in the fact that what counts as abump, a thing, or a relevant alternative for purposes of determining theirapplicability varies; a lecture hall, for example, will count as empty even

though it contains light bulbs, but a kitchen drawer will not. Thus in aclassic Dretskean example a claim on my part to know that the animal I seeat the zoo is a zebra will typically be true, since my evidence will suffice toeliminate its being a lion, a tiger, or any other normal zoo animal, whichwill be the only relevant alternatives. However, i f the possibility of theanimal’s being a mule painted to look like a zebra were for some reasonrelevant, then my claim might well be false, since my evidence wouldtypically not suffice to eliminate that possibility.

DeRose has voiced an objection to this theory which, though it raises animportant issue, is based on a misconception. He faults it for its inability toexplain the plausibility of the claim that we do not know not-ED; the factthat S cannot rule out ED in favor of some relevant alternative is, he says,“too close” to the fact that S does not know not-ED for the former to countas an explanation of the latter. The problem with this objection can be seenas follows. Suppose that Martha Washington’s diary contains an entry to theeffect that a painfully infected finger made George irritable on his forty-thirdbirthday, that it gives no indication of which finger was afflicted, and that we

have no other relevant information. In that case it is not only plausible, butobvious, that (i) we do not know that it was his left index finger that wasinfected. But in saying this, I am not of course claiming that (i) is intrinsi-cally plausible; rather, I am claiming that it is plausible in the context of (ii)

CONTEXTUALIST SWORDS, SKEPTICAL LOWSHARES 39 5



the fact that there are nine (seven) relevant alternatives to the hypothesis thatit was George’s left index finger that was infected, and (iii) the fact that ouravailable evidence is transparently neutral among the ten (eight) possibilities.The important point is that, given (ii) and (iii), there is little to be done, byrelevant alternativists or anyone else, in the way of explaining the context-

bound plausibility of (i); not only is there no need for such an “explanation”,but there is no room for one.

Notoriously, things are not usually so clear-cut; in particular, some

vagueness usually surrounds the question of which alternatives are relevant.However, with respect to the crucial matter of my failure to know not-ED,the situation is clear enough. In order for ED itself to be among the relevantalternatives, my evidence cannot entail not-ED, but must comprise only mysubjective experience; that is, E l must be true. Relative to that evidence thereis a vast number of relevant alternative hypotheses concerning the nature ofreality, and according to E2 that evidence provides no basis for preferring anyone of them over the others, i.e., it is completely neutral among them. Hencehere too, i.e., in the context of E l and E2, there can be no question ofexplaining the plausibility of the claim that I do not know any particular one

of those hypotheses to be t ru e - o r false-and it is therefore no defect in RA-

theory that it cannot provide such an explanation.There is, however, at least one serious problem with all forms of RA-

theory. Though there is some divergence among theorists on the question of

how the relevance of alternatives is determined, all agree on one point: thefactual situation can itself make some alternatives relevant. Henry, for exam-ple, does not know that what he sees is a barn if he just happens to be look-ing at the only genuine barn in an area densely populated with papier-machi

fakes that are good enough to fool him, because in that situation the possibil-

ity that he is looking at a papier-machi fake is an uneliminated relevant alter-native. Indeed Dretske, along with David Armstrong,” sometimes takes anextreme position on this score, holding that only the objective facts can

determine which alternatives are relevant, and that the slightest objectiveprobability of an alternative’s being true suffices to make it relevant:

[Tlhe difference between a relevant and an irrelevant alternative resides ... in the kind ofpossibilities that actually ex ist in the objective situation. Whether or not our bird watcher know sthat the bird he sees is a Gadwall depends on whether or not, in som e objective sense, it could

be a look-alike grebe (or any other similar looking creature) _.. owever improbable thispossibility may be (377-78; my emphases).

However, RA-theorists also hold that there is a second way in which

alternatives may become relevant: speakers can sometimes make them so. Allagree that even skeptical hypotheses can be relevant alternatives in unusual

‘ I For Armstrong’s views, see his B ef ie f ,Trurh und K n o w fed g e (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1973).

396 B R E D 0 C. OHNSEN



circumstances-when, for example, the topic of conversation is the veryquestion of the possible truth of some such hypothesis.’*

Thus all RA-theorists hold that both objective probabilities and speakers’intentions or presuppositions can independently determine the relevance orirrelevance of an alternative. Consequently, all versions of the theory harbor

inconsistencies. Consider again Henry, who correctly thinks that he sees abarn, though there are many fakes in the vicinity which are good enough todeceive him; by the objective-probability criterion, a claim by Henry to knowthat the building is a barn would be false, since its being a fake is an unelim-inated relevant alternative. But now imagine that his young son Jimmy askshim whether he knows what kind of building it is, and Henry says, “Sure;it’s a barn.” Since Henry and Jimmy are presupposing that it is a genuinebui ld ing, its being a fake is nor a relevant alternative by the speaker’s-presupposition criterion, and presents no obstacle to the truth of his claim.

Some versions of RA-theory appear, at least, to suffer from a seconddifficulty. According to these versions, we know very little on those rareoccasions when skeptical hypotheses are relevant, but we almost alwaysknow a great deal. That is, I may know at time t, but not at t+l, that the catis in the carton, even though the only thing that has happened in the interimis that a skeptic has succeeded in expanding the range of relevant alternatives;he can literally strip me of knowledge simply by altering the course of ourconversation in this way. Now the skeptic’s success in introducing new alter-

natives may have some significant consequences, including, perhaps, that Iwould no longer be correct in claiming to know that the cat is in the carton;but the implication that there is a modest bit of knowledge which I possessedjust moments ago, but which has suddenly vanished, is surely to be countedamong the costs of any theory.”

See, for example, Gail Stine, “Scepticism, Relevant Alternatives, and DeductiveClosure,” Philosophical Studies 29, 4 (1976): 249-61, Stewart Cohen, “Know ledge andContext”, Journal of Philosophy 83, 10 (1986): 574-83, Alvin Goldm an, “Discriminationand Perceptual Knowledge,”Journal of Philosophy 73 (1976). 771-91, and David Lewis,“Elusive Knowledge”.Lewis is unapologetic about the costs he is willing to accept. In “Elusive Knowledge” heargues explicitly for such consequences of his own theory as that knowledge vanishesupon examination and that, ceteris paribus, the more imaginative one is, the less oneknows. Further, he is willing to pay this price even though his theory actually impliesskepticism, which he is therefore able to reject only by making anad hoc exception. Heargues that the exception “makes good sense in view of the function of attributions ofknowledge,” apparently having in mind the charge that skepticism would requireus tomake “frequent corrections of what we want to say;”I dispute this idea in SectionIV .For related views, see Stewart Cohen,op. cit., and Catherine Elgin, “The EpistemicEfficacy of Stupidity”, Synthese 74 (1988). 297-31 1 .

l 3




I11

In this section I shall propose a modified version of RA-theory whichaddresses these and other difficulties. For the reasons given earlier, I shallframe the discussion in terms of Dretske’s conception of knowledge as anevidential state which eliminates all the relevant alternatives to the subject’s

true belief.In modifying the theory, the most pressing need is to eliminate the incon-

sistency noted in Section II.I4 This is readily, and persuasively, accomplishedby adopting modified versions of three Dretskean proposals.

( I) The content of a claim that S knows P is that S believes P, P istrue, and S’s evidential state eliminates all of the other members ofthe relevant category of alternatives to P.

This differs from Dretske’s proposal only in identifying the relevant alterna-tives by their membership in a relevant category of alternatives.”

(11) The relevant category of alternatives, e.g., propositions concerningvarious types of native birds or genuine buildings, is determinedsolely by the speaker (typically by his simply presupposing thatcategory’s relevance).

Given (I), there is a simple argument for (11). To attribute knowledge is toclaim that the subject’s evidential state eliminates all of the members of therelevant category of alternatives to what he believes. Hence, ceten’s paribus, aresponsible attributer of knowledge must take himself to know which cate-gory is relevant, and as a general matter he could not reasonably do so unlesshe himself determined which category that was. Reflection on our assessmentof ordinary knowledge claims supports this proposal. Suppose that Bill andSue share her car, that Bil l asks her, “Do you know where your car isparked?”, and that she says, “Yeah, it’s on 73rd at West End.” What she

thereby claims to know (nearly enough) is that it is parked at that member of

~~~ ~ ~~ ~ ~~

l 4 DeRose has addressed this inconsistency in “Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions”,Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (1992) 913-29, and “Relevant Alterna-tives and the Content of Knowledge Attributions”, Philosophy and PhenomenologicalResearch 56 (1996) 193-97, but his proposed solution is of course framed in terms of ES-theory.Dretske’s original proposal is to be. found in his “Epistemic Operators”, Journal of ph i l o s -

To know that X is A is to know that X is A within a framework of relevantalternatives, B, C and D. This se t ofconrrasrs together with the fact that X isA, serve to define what it is that is known when one know s that X is A, . . Wehave subtle ways of ... changing what a person is said to know wi t hou tchanging the sentence that we use to express what he knows (1022; emphasesmine, except for the last).

I s

ophy 68 (1970). 1007-23:

398 B R E W C. OHNSEN



the category of neighbornood-locations-at-which-the-car-might-be-parked; hedoes not claim to know, butpresupposes, that it is parked at some such loca-tion, that it has not been moved since she parkedit , and hosts of othermatters, e.g., that the car in question is actually hers, and does not belong,because of some legal slip-up, to the shoddy institution through which she

financed it. Hence it would be preposterous of B ill to criticize her for hav ingfalsely claimed to know where her car wasif it turns out to have been stolenand abandoned in New Jersey,or not to belong to her at Note that rela-tive to a typical conversational know ledge claim, adopting (11) is tantamountto regarding relevance as determined by the speaker’s conversational context,given that the speaker is a com petent conversationalist and that the conversa-tion is well run, so that its participants share an appropriate set of presuppo-sitions. Thus Bill, for example, shares Sue’s presuppositions, andit is forprecisely that reason that he would not fault herin the ways described.

Adopting (11) requiresus to reject the D re ts ke aa -t he or et ic (IIId):

(IIId) The relevance of an alternative is sometimes determinedsolely bythe subject’s objective circumstances.

(HId) reflects the early post-Gettier(or Gettier) insight that one doesn’t knowP if one’s being right aboutP is to any sign ificant extent a matter of luck, as

I h I can find no entirely felicitous formulation of the content of the claim thatS knows P as

specified by RA-theory. What is wanted is an account which capturesall and only thosecomm itments whose failure to obtain would constitute legitimate grounds fo r charging thespeaker with having falsely attributed knowledge toS. What can be said in favor of myschema, “S knows that P-is-true-rather-than-any-other-member-of-category-~’, s that itdoes at least strongly, and correctly, suggest that the only legitimate basis on which tofault the maker of sucha claim (other, of course, than showing thatS does not believe P,or that S’s evidence fails to eliminate oneor more other members of C) would beademonstration that P is false, or that some other member of C is true. One a lternative thathas been suggested--“S know s that if some member of category C is true, then P istrue”-has its own drawbacks. First, assuming that what is known is identical with what isbelieved, it suggests thatS’s relevant belief is not the categorical belief that P is true, butthe conditional belief that if some member of category C is true, then P is true. But surelywhat 1 believe in favorable circumstances at thezoo s that I see a zebra, and not---or noton ly - th a t if wha t I see is a normal zoo animal, then it is a zebra. This proposal alsoraises the question why only the particular presupposition that some member of categoryC is true should be regarded as part of the content of the conditional’s antecedent. Why,for example, shouldn’t we construe the content of Sue’s claimas “If you and I arereferring, by ‘your car’ and ‘my car’ respectively, to the same car, and if that caractually is my car rather than the bank’s, and if no one has moved it and failed to returnit, and if _ _ _ . hen it is at 73rd and West End’? This is surely implausible. but it seems thaton this proposal the only way to avoid such an outcome w ouldbe to distinguish arbitrarilybetween those presuppositions that are, and those that are not, part of the content ofaknowledge claim. Palle Yourgrau’s “Knowledge and Relevant Alternatives,”Synthese55 (1983). 175-90, offers a penetrating analysis of this problem. My example isadescendant of Jonathan Vogel’s Stolen Car Case; see his “Are There Counterex amplestothe Closure Principle?” in Roth,M. nd Ross, G., eds., Doubting (Dordrecht: KluwerAcademic Publishers, 1990),13-27,




in the case of Henry and the fake barns.I7 In effect, disagreements about how

many fakes at what spatiotemporal distance from Henry suffice to preventhim from knowing that he is looking at a barn are disagreements over thedegree of luck that is compatible with knowledge. Here Dretske, as we haveseen, takes the extreme position that none is. On his view, a bird watcher

knows that the bird he sees is a Gadwall duck only if it is impossible thatany Siberian Grebes, which he could not distinguish from Gadwalls, havemigrated to the area, regardless of whether any have done so; and even if suchmigration is impossible, the bird’s being a Grebe will still be a relevant

alternative if, say, the possibility that some fanatical fraternity brothers havetransported some Grebes and released them locally in an effort to deceive their

Greek rivals has even an infinitesimal objective probability.Dretske has long had within his grasp the means for resolving the

problem more persuasively. His correct intuition about these matters buildson (I), and is captured not by (IIId), but by (111):

(111) Within the relevant category of alternatives, which is determined bythe speaker, the relevance of a particular possibility is determined bythe subject’s circumstances.

Given (111), our bird watcher can know that what he sees is a-Gadwall-rather-than-any-other-species-of-bird-in-the-area, even if there could have been

Grebes in the area, but he can not know it if there are Hadwalls in the areawhich he could not distinguish from Gadwalls, even if neither he nor anyoneelse is aware of that fact. Similarly, Henry can know that what he sees is a-barn-rather-than-any-other-kind-of-genuine-building-in-the-ureu egardless ofhow many fake barns are how nearby, but not if there is a local sect whoseunusual sanctuaries he could not distinguish from barns.lX

In addition to eliminating the inconsistency that characterizes earlierversions of RA-theory, the conjunction of (I), (11) and (I IIhhereafter FL4’-compares favorably with those versions on several other scores. First, itavoids the following difficulty. On those occasions when RA-theorists havesuggested-cont rary to RA’-that the relevance of an alternative is deter-mined solely by the objective probabilities, what they have had in mind is,

l7 See , for example, Peter Unger’s “An Analysis of Factual Knowledge,”Journal of

Philosophy 65 (1968), 157-70, an early response to the celebrated problem set forth inEdmund L. Gettier’s ‘‘Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”Analysis 23 (1963). 121-23.Suppose that there used to be such sanctuaries in the area, but that the last of them burnedto the ground last night, and that Henry sees today the same barn that he saw yesterday.Does today’s belief that he sees a barn, but not yesterday’s, constitute knowledge?Forsome, the unqualified restrictionof relevant alternatives to those buildings which existcontem poraneously with H enry’s belief w ill seem simply arbitrary, and its consequence,that Henry’s kn owing it’s a barn is to some extent a matterof luck, unacceptable. So fa ras I can see, there is no motivated wayof eliminating from RA-theory this sort of residualproblem about what to countas a relevant alternative.

400 B R E D 0 C. OHNSEN





conditions of knowledge claims; but they are often self-misdescribed as doing

(ii) RA’ provides an explanation of two other important contextualist

insights. (a) In principle, the same sentence can be used in a given conversa-tional context to make different knowledge claims, depending on which

category of relevant alternatives the speaker intends. (The reason this seldomleads to misunderstanding is that the participants in any well run conversationshare a set of presuppositions which normally determine what knowledgeclaim is made by means of a given utterance.) (b) The truth value of a givenknowledge claim can vary solely by virtue of objective differences betweencontexts. A claim that S knows that some bird is a-Gadwall-rather-than-any-other-species-of-bird-in-the-area may be true if no indistinguishable-by-SHadwalls are in the area, but false if any are, regardless of whether the speakeror anyone else is so much as aware of the existence of Hadwalls. (Of course,

if no one is aware of the existence of Hadwalls, then everyone will think andsay that various individuals-who could not distinguish Gadwalls from Had-walls-know that the birds they see are Gadwalls; but then everyone willsimply be mistaken.)

(iii) RA’ provides a much more intuitive account of phenomena oftencited in support of the alleged existence of multiple standards for the truth ofknowledge claims, and it allows us to see skeptics not as insisting on highstandards for knowledge, but rather as challenging our deepest presupposi-

tions, just as, arguably, we have always known they were doing. Consideragain the zebras. It is quite plausible to suppose that what is going on whenthe “skeptical” painted-mule possibility is raised is that a certain presupposi-tion, viz., that these animals are ordinary zoo animals, is being challenged. Ifthis challenge succeeds, so that the conversation takes a new turn, then theevidential base is thereby contracted-we are no longer permitted to rely onthe challenged presupposition, and typically we will no longer be justified inclaiming to know that the animals are zebras. However, in this new situa-

tion, with its wider range of relevant alternatives, there will be some largerbody of evidence which would be adequate to discriminate among them, andto ground a new claim to knowledge. Relative to such an account, there is no

reason to suppose that the strength of the warranting relation betweenevidence and hypothesis that is required for knowledge is not exactly the samein the two situations; that is, there is no reason to postulate different stan-dards.”’

19

20

402

Thus Lew is: “U nless this investigation of ours was an altogether atypical sample of epis-temology, it will be inevitable that epistemology must destroy knowledge. That is howknow ledge is elusiv e. Examine it, and straightway it vanishes.” “Elusive Knowledge”, 1 1.Dretske has a good discussion of this point in “The Pragmatic Dim ension of Knowledge”.One need not concur in his choice of a standard in order to find his argument for the exis-tence of a single standard persuasive.

B R E D 0 C. JOHNSEN



(iv) We can explain our increasing chariness about claiming knowledge asthe stakes get higher without appealing either to phantom multiple standardsfor the truth of knowledge claims or to proliferating weaker and strongersenses of “know”: the higher the stakes, the less willing we are to take forgranted our usual presuppositions. As the building superintendent, I will tell

almost anyone that I know the elevator to be safe, and in doing so I will read-ily presuppose that its having been inspected within the month suffices toinsure its having no significant defects. But if an advance man asks the samequestion in anticipation of the President’s visit, I may not be willing to relyon that presupposition, in which case I may say that I don’t know, and havethe elevator reinspected.

(v ) We can explain the obvious truth of Dretske’s contention that radicalskeptical hypotheses “have [no] impact on our ordinary use of the verb ‘toknow’,’’ while rejecting his claim that the explanation lies in their being “toofanciful”. The reason they have no impact is simply that they are almostnever relevant alternatives to what we claim to know. The same is true, how-ever, of all sorts of hypotheses which are not fanciful at all; for example, thestanding, and all too unfanciful, possibility that the President of the UnitedStates has just been assassinated has no impact on our ordinary use of“know” in claiming to know that the President is a former Governor ofArkansas.

(vi) We can understand and resolve RA-theorists’ intramural disagreementsabout deductive closure, i.e., the validity of such inferences as the following:

(a) S knows W,(b) S knows W entails not-ED;Hence,(c) S knows not-ED.

Given RA’, (a)-(c) are elliptical, since they do not make explicit thecontrastive nature of the various propositions said to be known, and theargument’s validity can be seen to be uncontroversial once they are madefully explicit. In order to keep the reformulated argument reasonably compact,let us say, when S knows that P-rather-than-any-other-member-of-category-Cis true, that S knows P within framew ork F , the idea being that this frame-work is created by the presupposition that some member of category C istrue. Given, then, that S knows that she is sitting-rather-than-occupying-any-

other-posture, we may reformulate the argument as follows:

(a’) S knows W within framework F;(b’) S knows W ntails not-ED within F (or any other framework);Hence,(c’) S knows not-ED within F.

CONTEXTUALISTSWORDS, SKEPTICAL PLOWSHARES 403



Suppose that S knows-within frameworkZ, which is created by the presup-position that she is looking at a normal zoo animal-that what she sees is azebra; then she also knows within Z not only that it is not a cleverly paintedmule, but that it is not a cockroach, a cathedral, or a crossbow. Within Z, i tis given that what she sees is a normal zoo animal, and hence that it is none

of these things. Perhaps some have balked at accepting the closure principlebecause they have seen it as legitimizing the inference from something like(a’) and (b’) to (c), the latter being implicitly understood as saying that Sknows within any framework whatever that not-ED. That inference is obvi-ously invalid; equally obviously, however, i t is not an instance of deductiveclosure, since in order to have an instance of that principle, we must hold theframework constant throughout the argument, on pain of committing some-thing like the fallacy of equivocation.21

IV

I take it, then, that in RA’ we have a theory which goes some distance towardshowing that contextualism deserves to be taken very seriously as a theory ofthe truth conditions for knowledge claims. In this final section, however, Ishall argue that to the extent that RA’ aptures the genuine strengths ofcontextualism, that theory holds no promise of providing a response to skep-ticism.

For purposes of understanding the relation between contextualism andskepticism, the most important implications of RA’ are these:

(vii) The skeptic does not dispute ordinary knowledge claims as understoodon RA’; no skeptic has ever denied that if we presuppose enough, then ourevidential state will suffice to eliminate all but one of the remaining possibil-ities. When skeptics have disputed ordinary knowledge claims, they haveconstrued those claims as including claims to know things which, accordingto RA’, we ordinarily presuppose, and do not claim to know.

(viii) Since on RA’ ordinary knowledge claims are, even from the

skeptic’s perspective, not falsehoods, but framework-bound truths, he has noneed to appeal to such hypotheses as that those claims are “pragmaticallyjustified”, or answerable only to criteria of “warranted assertibility”, in orderto rationalize the propriety of our making them.22

RA’ s, in fact, entirely compatible with radical skepticism. A radicalskeptic persuaded of its truth would express his view as follows: Every trueclaim to contingent knowledge of the external world is framework-bound, andpresupposes one or more arbitrary, i.e., unsupported and unsupportable,hypotheses, if only the hypothesis that we inhabit a physical universe;

2’

22Gail Stine m ade this point in her paper cited in note 13 above.For views of these sorts, see Bany Stroud’s The SigniJicance of Philosophical Scepticism(Oxford: O xford University Press, 1984) and Peter Unger’s Philosophical Relativity(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 198 4).

404 BREDOC. JOHNSEN



consequently, the truth of any such claim is of no more philosophical interest

than the truth of my claim to know that Milan Kundera is in Ventimiglia(where, as luck would have it, he is), given that I arbitrarily presuppose, in

making that claim, that he is either in my study or in Ventimiglia, so thatthose are the only relevant alternatives.

As for the challenge posed by SA, the skeptic would respond as follows.To begin with, (3) is obviously true (as any contextualist would agree), andof great philosophical significance, when it is understood as expressing (3sk):

(3sk) I do not know that W-rather-than-any-of-the-possible-alternatives-to-W is true; alternatively, I do not know within the framework consti-tuted by W and all of its possible alternatives that W is true.

On the other hand, he would argue, the reason we almost always find not-(3)

plausible, indeed obviously true, is that we almost always understand it asexpressing the denial of (3ra):

(3,J I do not know that W-rather-than-any-of-the-relevant-alternatives-to-W is true; alternatively, I do not know that W is true within theframework constituted by W and all of its relevant alternatives, e.g.,that I am standing up or pacing around the room.

Construed as not-(3,,), not-(3) is plausible, indeed obvious-I do know that Iam sitting-rather-than-standing-or-pacing; but it is of no philosophicalsignificance whatever, since its truth depends on least one entirely arbitrarypresupposition.

I conclude that, at least as so far developed, contextualism provides noresponse to skepticism. Whether some future version of that theory will bemore successful is, of course, an open question, but I shall close with areflection which suggests at least some reason for doubt. Contextualist writ-

ings are often self-described as inspired in part by Wittgenstein, and while

this is not the place to try to trace the connections, there is a significantpoint that should be noted about one of his most persuasive and influentialsimiles:

[Tlhe questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions areexem pt from doubt, are as i t were like h inges on which those turn .... If I want the door to turn,the hinges must stay

From the perspective of RA’, presuppositions play the role of hinges for ourthought, including our doubts and questions, and some of those presupposi-tions play deep and important roles in our lives. The crucial question, how-

23 Wittgenstein, L udwig, On Certainty (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1969). sections 341 and343.

CONTEXTUALIST SWO RDS. SKEPTICAL PLOWSHARES 405



ever, is whether any of them is in any relevant sense exempt from doubt. Theskeptic thinks not, and could make his point quite effectively in terms ofWittgenstein’s simile: the hinges on the cockpit door may be doing their job,including staying put, superbly well, whether the Concorde in which thepassengers, the cockpit, the door and its peerless hinges are all contained is

resting on the tarmac, racing toward Paris at Mach 2, or spinning wildly outof control and plunging toward a watery grave.

For the skeptic who embraces RA’ there is no more fault to be found withour claims to know things about the world than with our claims that varioushinges are staying put and functioning perfectly. But just as the truth of thelatter claims does not imply that those hinges occupy fixed locations in abso-lute space, so the truth of the former does not imply that our beliefs aboutthe world have any absolute, i.e., non-relative, credibility or epistemicstrength. Just as hinges are stationary only relative to some frame of refer-ence, so, in the skeptic’s view, our beliefs about the external world have epis-temic strength only relative to at least one epistemically arbitrary, utterlyunsupportable, hence epistemically worthless, presupposition; that is, suchepistemic strength as they have is epistemically worthless; that is, eschewingoxymoron, they have no epistemic strength that is of any philosophicalsignificance, and we know nothing about any such world.

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