Knowledge and context
191-0091328-1103
Project Director dr. sc. Zvonimir Čuljak
Summary:
BACKGROUND: The contemporary philosophical analysis of the individual propositional knowledge is dominated by the externalist thesis that knowledge is a function of external factors: (i) reliable belief-producing processes or relations of reliable indications of truth (reliabilism), (ii) stable epistemic dispositions/virtues of a believer (virtue epistemology), (iii) the epistemic position, which excludes relevant contrary alternatives (relevantism) and/or (iv) the epistemic context, i.e. the context of knowledge attribution (contextualism). OBJECTIVES AND HYPOTHESES: (1) It is to show (i) that externalism provides a more successful account of knowledge in general than internalism, (ii) that attributor contextualism does not refute non-skeptical, externalist invariantism, (iii) that attributor contextualism is not epistemologically neutral, i.e. it implies certain (implausible) conceptions of the structure and status of knowledge (relativism, pluralism) and of the epistemological methodology. Knowledge is, therefore, an invariant, whose concept can be successfully analyzed in externalist terms. (2) The normative and descriptive aspects of inference and inferential knowledge are to be investigated as well as whether and how the normativity is context-dependent. The epistemic position of a subject depends on his context, but not on the context of an attributor. (3) A context arguably determines the meaning and reference of singular terms and, consequently, of statements, including epistemic statements, but the truth-value of sentences does not depend on a context. EXPECTED RESULTS: 7 papers (topics: externalism vs. internalism; procedural knowledge; the pragmatic dimension of knowledge; epistemic norms; invariantism vs. contextualism; truth-condition of knowledge; the knowledge a priori), 1 book (on naturalism and externalism), 2 dissertations (on the normative and descriptive aspects of inference, and on the context-dependence of reference and meaning of singular terms), talks at several conferences, the proceedings on the topics from this project. THE METHOD OF CHECKING THE RESULTS: Conceptual and semantic analysis, logical proofs, construction of examples and counter-examples, consulting the results of cognitive psychology. THE IMPORTANCE OF THE PROPOSED RESEARCH: It can provide answers to certain questions concerning key philosophical and practical problems (of knowledge, of the nature of inference and logical relations as well as of linguistic mea
Project assistants:
Zvonimir Čuljak
Dušan Dožudić
Dragana Sekulić