[Alta-Logic] Talk on Wednesday

[Gillman Payette]

Title: The many dimensions of contextualism in epistemology II

Start: 02/16/2011 - 15:30
End: 02/16/2011 - 16:30

Speaker: Gillman Payette and Masashi Kasaki

Place: ICT 616

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.

In the last talk we introduced skepticism, contextualism and Lewis's
sphere semantics for counterfactuals. In this talk we will briefly review
these notions and then present our semantics for contextualism that allows
skepticism to remain a genuine threat.

-- 
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