Saturday, June 20, 2009

Quantifiers, Knowledge, and Counterfactuals

Quantifiers, Knowledge, and Counterfactuals, forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
Many of the motivations in favor of contextualism about knowledge apply also to a contextualist approach to counterfactuals. I motivate and articulate such an approach, in terms of the context-sensitive ‘all cases’, in the spirit of David Lewis’s contextualist view about knowledge. The resulting view explains intuitive data, resolves a puzzle parallel to the skeptical paradox, and renders safety and sensitivity, construed as counterfactuals, necessary conditions on knowledge.

2 comments:

  1. [...] matter. The relevant class of possibilities is relevant for other modal language, too. I’ve argued, controversially, that this is the case for ‘knows’. But there are much less [...]

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  2. [...] of contextualism about ‘knows’. I’ve committed myself to contextualism in a couple of papers, but so far I have tried to avoid a commitment to any particular semantic treatment of [...]

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