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No description available.

The late 1980s and early 1990s saw the rise of contextualist theories of knowledge ascriptions (and denials). Contextualists about ‘knows' maintain that utterances of the form ‘S knows p' and ‘S doesn't know p' resemble utterances such as ‘Peter is here' and ‘Peter is not here', in the sense that their truth-conditions vary depending upon features of the context in which they are uttered. In recent years, contextualism about ‘knows' has come under heavy attack. This has been associated with a proliferation of defences of so-called invariantist accounts of knowledge ascriptions, which stand united in their rejection of contextualism. The central goal of the present work is two-fold. In the first instance, it is to bring out the serious pitfalls in many of those recent defences of invariantism. In the second instance, it is to establish that the most plausible form of invariantism is one that is sceptical in character. Of course, the prevailing preference in epistemology is for non- sceptical accounts. The central conclusions of the thesis might therefore be taken to show that – despite recent attacks on its plausibility – some form of contextualism about ‘knows' must be correct. However, this project is not undertaken without at least the suspicion that embracing (a particular form of) sceptical invariantism is to be preferred to embracing contextualism. In the course of the discussion, I therefore not only attempt to rebut some standard objections to sceptical invariantism, but also to reveal – in at least a preliminary way – how the sceptical invariantist might best argue for the superiority of her account to that of the contextualist.

This thesis aims to provide a semantic account of belief ascriptions of the form 'A believes that S'. It begins with a detailed discussion of Saul Kripke's famous 'Puzzle about Belief' and tries to unearth a fundamental but rarely explicitly articulated assumption that gives the steps of the derivation of Kripke's Puzzle their intuitive plausibility. The assumption can be roughly stated as follows: belief ascriptions report on some single ontologically prior mental state which grounds the truth of a true ascription. A response to one form of Kripke's Puzzle is suggested at the end of this discussion. Several apparently diverse kinds of response to Kripke's Puzzle are critically evaluated and are found to be unsatisfactory. Many of the problems with these responses are traced to the fact that they are built upon the assumption that I suggest is at the heart of Kripke's Puzzle. The beginnings of a positive account of the semantics of belief ascriptions are given. The account gives a central role to the fact that the truth-value of a belief ascription depends on elements of the conversational setting in which it occurs. It is suggested that belief ascriptions are essentially answers to questions asked by an audience who has specific interests and makes specific assumptions about the agent and the setting of the ascription. The interests of the audience and the background assumptions that she makes are two- distinct sources of the context-sensitivity of belief ascriptions. The account makes no appeal to any kind of inner mental representations, but instead says that the truth of an ascription depends in a complex way on the agent's dispositions and capacities to do, say, think, and feel certain things. The thesis ends with a discussion of the de dicto/ de re distinction, and suggests that the distinction does not provide the most useful way of understanding belief ascription. It is argued that truly de re ascriptions are probably very rare, and that this does not therefore mean that most ascriptions are de dicto.

In the thesis I will argue that some models of evolutionary epistemology provide an extremely illuminating and original explanation of the workings of the scientific process. Evolutionary approaches to the growth of scientific knowledge have been criticised because of the putative existence of fundamental disanalogies between biological and scientific selective processes. I will show that these criticisms are largely misguided. I will distinguish two main kinds of evolutionary models. EEM models, which focus on the evolution of human cognitive mechanisms by natural selection (e.g. that developed by Ruse), do not provide a satisfactory basis on which to explain the nature of scientific selection processes, which are cultural rather than biological in origin. EET models, by contrast, focusing on the cultural and social origins of the selective systems operating in science, are better suited to this task. I will focus mainly on the EET models proposed by Donald Campbell and David Hull. Two general themes emerge from their analysis: the emphasis on the general validity of the variation-selection model of knowledge acquisition (i.e. trial-and-error), and the view that science is a socially adaptive and adapted system, governed by the action of peculiar selective mechanisms that partially lead to epistemic success. On the basis of the critical examination of these EET models I will argue for three main conclusions. First, EET approaches are correct in rejecting the methodological individualism so central to many alternative epistemologies. Second, EET models offer us genuinely normative epistemological insights, particularly where social epistemology is concerned. Third, EET provides a viable naturalistic alternative to social constructivism, by justifying epistemic standards as "evolutionary constructions" (i.e., products of selection processes).

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Recent construals of the later Wittgenstein's meaning as use thesis have represented it as leading to one of four options: anti-realism, meaning-reductionism, meaning-scepticism, or quietism. I argue that none is forced on us by it, leaving room for modest realism, a substantial conception of meaning, and philosophical debate. Four key elements to the thesis are: 'Supervenience on Use': A conception of meaning according to which meaning is exhausted by use. 'Full Manifestation': Meaning is fully manifest in linguistic practice, and understanding is a practical ability. . 'Modesty': A view that characterisations of meaning can only be given from in the middle of things. lt is only possible to characterise meaning from within a practice, and by taking it for granted that we are competent language users whose words are meaningful. 'Quietism': A view that a proper understanding of the other aspects of the use doctrine puts an end to, or limits, what can count as philosophical debate. No abstract philosophical account of meaning is necessary or possible, just reminders of use in different regions of discourse. Each of the four options above puts too much emphasis on one or other of these aspects. In fact, a proper understanding of the thesis involves recognition of all four. Origins of the thesis can be traced back to Wittgenstein's acceptance of Frege's Context Principle in the Tractatus, and the four elements of the mature thesis emerge out of the Philosophical /nvestigations. However, the way in which it makes room for realism, whilst rejecting or modifying quietism, becomes clear only in On Certainty. Wittgenstein's last work thus represents a significant further development in his thinking, on the one hand representing a return to earlier themes in the Tractatus, and on the other casting new light on aspects of the use thesis in the investigations.

In this thesis, I argue that the epistemology of memory is a useful but neglected explanatory resource in the philosophical treatment of problems associated with introspection. Not only is a far-reaching convergence in our thinking about introspective failure and memory failure, but by focusing on the epistemology of memory it is possible to explain much of what is thought special about knowledge of our own minds. To demonstrate, I arrange the purportedly distinctive features of self-knowledge into a list of desiderata that can be used to measure the success of a theory. Once the desiderata are clear, it can be shown how the epistemology of memory plays an important role in explaining how a prominent approach of self-knowledge might be successful, and how memory can explain or enhance explanations of some of the main desiderata. To demonstrate the extent to which the memory can be explanatorily useful in this domain, I construct a test theory of self-knowledge around a standard case of recollection and show that it fares well against most if not all desiderata.

Slurring epithets or slurs like 'Frog' and 'Boche' are derogative terms but it is unclear why they are derogatory. This work discusses several proposals to answer this question. One commonality with the discussed views is that they all hold that derogation has something to do with semantics, broadly with the meaning of slurs. I disagree with this. I go on to introduce generic descriptivism. It is a novel view to handle slurs and it has two distinctive features. First, generic descriptivism holds that the nature of derogation is epistemic. derogation is due to the information which slurs contain. This is specied with the notion of stereotype. I claim that negative and unwarranted stereotypes are responsible for derogation. This information is not semantic. That is, it is to be distinguished from the meaning of slurs. Secondly, the eponymous feature of generic descriptivism is that it holds that the information which slurs contain is generic. I argue that generic beliefs are produced with a psychological mechanism of generalisation. In relation to social kinds, the mechanism can produce xenophobic generalisations and the use of slurs display these negative beliefs. Derogation is due to this negative information which the slurs contain.