[Alta-logic] Peripatetic Seminar Feb 9th.

[Gillman Payette]

Speaker: Gillman Payette and Masashi Kasaki
Time: 3:30pm Wed. Feb 9, 2011
Place: ICT 616
Title: The many dimensions of contextualism in epistemology

Abstract:

Keith DeRose proposes a counterfactual account of knowledge and combines
it with a contextualist semantics.  In this paper, first, we give a formal
model for DeRose's contextualist counterfactual account of knowledge, by
taking it as a variation or augmentation of David Lewis's formal semantics
for counterfactuals.  Second, we extend our model by assigning two
different functions to contexts: to determine the relevant epistemic
standard and to specify the relevant similarity measure for ordering
possible worlds.  As a result, our model can deal with an objection to
DeRose's contextualism that it fails to handle the genuine threat of
skepticism.

-- 
Gillman Payette
Department of Philosophy
University of Calgary
2500 University Drive NW
Calgary, AB T2N 1N4, Canada
Ph 403.220.6463
Fax 403.289.5698