ISBN : 9780199564477
Contextualism, the view that the epistemic standards a subject must meet in order for a claim attributing knowledge to her to be true do vary with context, has been hotly debated in epistemology and philosophy of language during the last few decades. This volume presents, develops, and defends contextualist solutions to two of the stickiest problems in epistemology: the puzzles of skeptical hypotheses and of lotteries. It is argued that, at least by ordinary standards for knowledge, we do know that skeptical hypotheses are false, and that we've lost the lottery. Why it seems that we don't know that they're false tells us a lot, both about what knowledge is and how knowledge attributions work. The Appearance of Ignorance is the companion volume to Keith DeRose's 2009 title The Case for Contextualism: Knowledge, Skepticism, and Context, Volume 1.
1 Solving the Skeptical Problem; 2 Moorean Methodology: Was the Skeptic Doomed to Inevitable Defeat?; 3 Two Substantively Moorean Responses and the Project of Refuting Skepticism; 4 Contextualism and Skepticism: The Defeat of the Bold Skeptic; 5 Lotteries, Insensitivity, and Closure; 6 Insensitivity; 7 How Do We Know that We're Not Brains in Vats? Toward A Picture of Knowledge; Appendices