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Relativism and Conservatism

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Abstract

Relativism and contextualism have been suggested as candidate semantics for “knowledge” sentences. I argue that relativism faces a problem concerning the preservation of beliefs in memory. Contextualism has been argued to face a similar problem. I argue that contextualists, unlike relativists, can respond to the concern. The overall upshot is that contextualism is superior to relativism in at least one important respect.

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Notes

  1. See e.g. Kompa (2005), Brogaard (2008), Richard (2008), MacFarlane (2014) for proponents of relativism.

  2. I assume throughout that “S” and “p” don’t contain relevantly context-sensitive material. I will further ignore tense as well as relativity to possible worlds. Nothing should depend on these simplifications. See footnote 9 for some further considerations about tense.

  3. See e.g. Dretske (1981).

  4. The bank example is due to DeRose (1992: 913).

  5. Cases such as DeRose’s (1992: 913) already mentioned bank cases and Cohen’s (1999: 58) airport case are typically taken to illustrate the respective variation.

  6. To be sure, CONS must be construed as a principle about dispositional rather than occurrent belief (to the extent that we want to draw such a distinction). Occurrent beliefs come and go much more easily.

  7. See Annis (1980: 330f), Harman (1986: 29f), Huemer (1999: 351), Owens (2000: 155), McGrath (2007: 14), Bernecker (2008: 126), Goldman (2009) for further proponents of preservationism in the above sense. One may even find a commitment to preservationism in Plato when he rhetorically asks “whether a man who has learned, and remembers, can fail to know” (Theaetetus, 163d). Frise (2017) is a rare opponent of preservationism. Note that “preservationism” is sometimes used to label more controversial views (Frise 2017: 487f). As stated, preservationism says, roughly, that justified beliefs remain justified. A stronger claim would be that beliefs retain whatever justificatory status they initially have. Senor (2014), for instance, takes preservationism to entail not only that justified beliefs remain justified but also that “a belief that had no justification when it was formed […] will be unjustified when recalled.” The latter claim conflicts with the popular idea of “generativism,” according to which memory can generate, rather than just preserve, justification (see e.g. Lackey 2005, 2007; Senor 2007 for discussion).

  8. We already saw that Plato plausibly subscribes to preservationism. Interestingly enough, he also uses this principle to construct an argument against (a form of) relativism (Theaetetus, 163c–164b; see 166a–168c for a candidate response). There are parallels to my argument, I think, but I won’t enter this exegetical minefield. Thanks to Evan Strevell for making me aware of Plato’s discussion.

  9. Problems similar to the one described may also arise for theories where the objects of belief are temporally neutral propositions. See Bernecker (2008: 159), Matthen (2010: 6ff) for pertinent discussion. To avoid these problems, we can replace CONS by a principle to the effect that we retain temporally updated versions of our beliefs (e.g. the belief that it is raining gets updated after a while to the belief that it was raining a while ago, etc.). I’ll leave open whether this modification is unproblematic. Just note that my objection against epistemic relativism could easily be restated in terms of the suggested modified version of CONS. What about relativism about predicates of personal taste (MacFarlane 2014)? The indicated memory problem might arise here as well, but it is certainly less severe. Taste standards plausibly change much less frequently over time than epistemic standards (see below for discussion). More importantly, taste beliefs that are incorrect due to a change in taste standards will be rectified as soon as we retry the relevant type of food. No similar mechanism is available in the case of knowledge.

  10. See Adler (2012: 254) for a similar observation.

  11. Adler (2012: 254) states that third-person knowledge-that beliefs are “a very rare kind of belief.” I’m not sure I agree, but the appeal to know-wh should mitigate the worry.

  12. In this way, we can also rebut some more theoretically motivated candidate responses to the memory problem above. First, I stipulated that Hannah’s evidential situation doesn’t relevantly shift as she moves between L and H. Proponents of so-called “total pragmatic encroachment” will find this stipulation problematic. They hold that factors that determine one’s epistemic standard also partly determine what evidence one has (see e.g. Weatherson 2017: 246ff for an overview). For instance, they might hold that high standards can be defeaters for otherwise justified beliefs. In third-person cases, we can respond by just stipulating that Hannah’s evidence for believing that Peter knows that p is so strong that high epistemic standards don’t defeat it. Peter’s evidence for believing that p may still be somewhat mediocre so that he counts as a knower only by low standards. Second, proponents of so-called “situation-sensitive” accounts of (outright) belief won’t like CONS. They hold that belief is a matter of having a credence above a certain threshold, where this threshold depends on parameters such as one’s epistemic standard (see e.g. Clarke 2017: 402 for a brief overview). On this view, we will retain beliefs throughout subsequent situations only as long as our initial credence is high enough for belief in these situations. But even if we weaken CONS in this way, third-person cases make trouble for relativism. Again, we can simply stipulate that Hannah’s initial credence is as high as it gets. If anything, third-person cases impose restrictions on Peter’s credences. It should also be noted that total pragmatic encroachment and subject-sensitivism about belief are highly contested views and that relativism is typically developed as an alternative to such positions (see e.g. MacFarlane 2014: 182ff).

  13. See also Adler (2012: 254), Rysiew (2012: 287), Brown (2014: 196), Moeller (2015: 4060), Hannon (2015: 121).

  14. MacFarlane (2014) proposes this idea without being properly aware of it. He discusses how a computer could store and maintain knowledge attributions in a relativist framework. He suggests that “[t]he computer would simply delete records where the [putatively knowing subject] did not meet [the current epistemic standard].” (313) This model doesn’t require the computer to keep track of earlier epistemic standards. But the computer must keep track of the subject’s earlier evidential situation. Otherwise it won’t be able to tell whether the subject “did not meet” the current epistemic standard. Incidentally, this explication of MacFarlane’s computer undermines the case MacFarlane wants to make for relativism over contextualism based on the suggested computer model. He argues that a contextualist computer is inferior to a relativist one because, unlike the relativist computer above, a contextualist computer needs to store previous epistemic standards (312). This advantage is spurious because, as indicated, the relativist computer avoids storing epistemic standards only at the cost of storing evidential situations.

  15. See also Harman (1986: 41), Huemer (1999: 346), McGrath (2007: 4), Bernecker (2008: 128), McCain (2015: 473).

  16. Such proposals have been made on behalf of contextualism (e.g. McKenna 2014; Hannon 2015) and what standardly goes by “subject-sensitive invariantism” (e.g. Grimm 2015). MacFarlane (2014) may be seen as suggesting stable epistemic standards on behalf of relativism (see below). See also McKenna (2017).

  17. A closely related candidate approach would be to grant that epistemic standards vary a lot and to argue instead that most of our “knowledge” lives up to the highest possible standard. Ichikawa’s (2017) “Moorean contextualism” goes in this direction. But Ichikawa only aims to safeguard a relatively limited class of basic knowledge, such as direct perceptual knowledge, against raised epistemic standards. This won’t be enough to dispel the memory problem. A more radical approach that safeguards most of our knowledge is conceivable. But such an approach hasn’t been defended, and it would presumably face the same types of worries I will raise for stable standards relativism.

  18. See footnote 5.

  19. See de Brasi (2014: 68) for a similar observation regarding contextualism.

  20. See also Turri (2010: 93n).

  21. See e.g. McKenna (2014), Hannon (2015), Grimm (2015) for recent candidate ideas and Gerken (2017: 197ff) for criticism of at least some of the points they make. Note that more traditional appeals to the ability to resolve skeptical arguments have rarely been taken to sufficiently motivate views like relativism on their own. See e.g. DeRose (2009: 41ff). Maybe relativism can help to resolve the “threshold problem” (BonJour 2010).

  22. All of these examples are among the most frequent collocations of the form “flat + NOUN” to be found in Davies (2008–).

  23. Note that it’s not entirely clear whether MacFarlane really wants to subscribe to a stable conception of epistemic standards. In other places, he suggests that it will be “fairly rare for two contexts to be governed by precisely the same standard.” (314).

  24. Interestingly enough, MacFarlane (2014: 312f) himself suggests that context-sensitivity for “knows” leads to added cognitive costs either in terms of storing epistemic standards (contextualism) or at least in terms of tracking the current epistemic standard (relativism). See footnote 14 for further potential cognitive costs for relativists.

  25. See e.g. Hawthorne (2004: 110), Williamson (2005: 100), Brueckner (2010), Adler (2012: 253f), Rysiew (2012: 286ff), de Brasi (2014), Moeller (2015), MacFarlane (2014: 311ff), Hannon (2015) for discussion.

  26. See e.g. DeRose (2009), Blome-Tillmann (2014), Ichikawa (2017).

  27. The belief that Peter knows that p by the standards of L might still not be correct overall as held in H if we assume a contextualistic knowledge norm for belief. For Hannah’s evidence for the claim that Peter knows that p by the standards of L may be too weak for proper belief in the new context. Similar problems presumably arise for any view imposing varying epistemic requirements for belief in different contexts. On such views, a belief that meets the epistemic requirements of one context need not meet the requirements of another. CONS will thus lead to trouble. I won’t discuss here how this more general issue could be resolved, but I suspect that situation-sensitivists about belief and total pragmatic encroachers (footnote 12) can get around the problem.

  28. Episodic memory is the primary focus of the contemporary memory debate. See Sutton (2016) for an overview. The kind of memory I’m primarily concerned with in this paper—what standardly goes by “semantic memory”—plays a relatively minor role. Klein (2015) even argues that semantic memory isn’t properly called “memory.” I’m not attached to the word.

  29. This worry is related to the worry from the lack of “clarification devices” for contextualism (Hawthorne 2004: 104–107). The latter worry though has nothing specifically to do with memory but concerns single conversations where attempts are made to shift the epistemic standard. See e.g. Blome-Tillmann (2008: 47–52, 2014: 125ff), DeRose (2009: 180ff) for replies on behalf of contextualism.

  30. See DeRose (2008: 145–147) for related observations.

  31. Solt (2018: 62) similarly distinguishes gradable adjectives “with” or “without numerical measures.”

  32. See DeRose (2008: 151f) for a similar observation.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Michael Hannon, Roman Heil, Thomas Krödel, Victoria Lavorerio, Andrew Peet, Guillermo Del Pinal, Sergiu Spatan, Emanuel Viebahn, Julia Zakkou, the participants of Benjamin Schnieder’s research colloquium in Hamburg, audiences in Cologne, Göttingen, Leuven and Vienna and two anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper.

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Funding was provided by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DE) (Grant No. DI 2172/1-1).

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Dinges, A. Relativism and Conservatism. Erkenn 85, 757–772 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-018-0047-z

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