Shifty talk: knowledge and causation

In this paper, I criticise one main strategy for supporting anti-intellectualism, the view that whether a subject knows may depend on the stakes. This strategy appeals to difficulties with developing contextualist and pragmatic treatments of the shiftiness of our talk about knowledge to motivate ant...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inPhilosophical studies Vol. 167; no. 2; pp. 183 - 199
Main Author Brown, Jessica
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Dordrecht Springer 01.01.2014
Springer Netherlands
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Anti intellectualism
Ascriptions
Barns
Causality
Causation
Contextualism
Contrafactuals
Education
Epistemology
Ethics
Knowledge
Metaphysics
Philosophy
Philosophy of Language
Philosophy of Mind
Politeness
Pragmatics
Rationalism
Tomatoes
Invariantism
Knowledge
Causation
Contextualism
Anti-intellectualism
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Summary:In this paper, I criticise one main strategy for supporting anti-intellectualism, the view that whether a subject knows may depend on the stakes. This strategy appeals to difficulties with developing contextualist and pragmatic treatments of the shiftiness of our talk about knowledge to motivate anti-intellectualism. I criticise this strategy by drawing an analogy between debates about causation and knowledge. In each case, talk about a phenomenon is shifty and contextualist and pragmatic explanations of the shifty talk face the same objections. However, in the case of causation it would be implausible to argue that difficulties with the relevant contextualist and pragmatic accounts motivate a revisionary metaphysics of causation. I conclude that the defender of anti-intellectualism needs to employ a different strategy to defend her view.
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ISSN:0031-8116
1573-0883
DOI:10.1007/s11098-012-0054-x