One of the central claims of contextualism is that it provides the “…best comport with our everyday knowledge-attributing practices” (Rysiew 2007). Given Rysiew’s account of contextualism, I interpret the phrase “our everyday knowledge-attributing practices” to involve something like the scenario where some person in Times Square who is asked the question “Do you know what time it is?” and she responds “it is 10:30.” When she responds to the question, she is capable of accurately ascribing knowledge to herself even if she is not a trained epistemologist (and so not worried about evil demons tricking her and such). Why is she able to accurately ascribe knowledge to herself? The reason is because she is in a context where the standards for knowledge are low. These low standards are “our everyday knowledge-attributing practices”.

I will give a very very brief sketch of what I think is the problem given our evidence from experimental philosophy. Swain, Alexander, and Weinberg (2007) conducted experiments that included a number of undergraduates and their intuitions with respect to Truetemp cases. They demonstrate that the intuitions of these undergraduates differ with respect to the ordering of the scenarios presented to the undergraduates. The reason I believe this creates a severe problem for the contextualist is something like the following. Suppose I present some scenarios involving knowledge to an “everyday person”, let us call them scenario A and scenario B. Most specifics of the scenarios are important, only that they there is person in the scenario and we try to determine whether that person has knowledge. Also, the two scenarios are distinct in that neither scenario makes reference to anything in the other scenario. Following Swain, Alexander, and Weinberg’s work, when we first present the everyday person with scenario A, she claims that the person in that case has knowledge. Next we present her with scenario B and she claims that the person in that case also has knowledge. Then we bring in another “everyday person”, but this time, we present scenario B to her first and then scenario A. The everyday person who is presented with the reverse order denies knowledge to the person in scenario B but grants it to the person A. This scenario is like the experiment done by Swain, Alexander, and Weinberg and those were their results.

What should we conclude from such an experiment? For it seems that the order in which an everyday person is presented with scenarios should be irrelevant with respect to whether the people in those scenarios have knowledge or not. If the contextualist claims that there are contexts in which the standards of knowledge are low and these are with the “everyday person” then there should be some standard which they use to determine knowledge. The experimental philosophy that was done appears to show the exact opposite, there are no standards for everyday knowledge use (not even “low” ones). The reason for such an assertion is the fact that everyday people ascribe knowledge in certain scenarios differs with respect to the order they are given the scenarios which is an arbitrary ascription of knowledge.

References

Hintikka (1999), “The Emperor’s New Intuitions,” Journal of Philosophy

Nagel (2007), “Epistemic Intuitions,” Philosophy Compass

Stich (1990), The Fragmentation of Reason, Cambridge

Swain, Alexander, and Weinberg (2007), “The Instability of Philosophical Intuitions: Running Hot and Cold on Truetemp,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research

Rysiew 2007, “Epistemic Contextualism,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Weatherson 2003, “What are good counterexamples?” Philosophical Studies

Weinberg 2007, “How to Challenge Intuitions Empirically Without Risking Skepticism,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy