Knowledge and practical interests

Clarendon Press

2005

xi, 191 p.

Lines of thought

9780199288038

contents: 1. Contextualism; 2. Knowledge ascriptions and gradability; 3. Knowledge ascriptions and context-sensitivity; 4. Contextualism on the cheap?; 5. Interest-relative invariantism; 6. Interest-relative invariantism versus contextualism; 7. Interest-relative invariantism versus relativism; 8. Contextualism, interest-relativism, and philosophical paradox.

Jason Stanley presents a startling and provocative claim about knowledge: that whether or not someone knows a proposition at a given time is in part determined by his or her practical interests. Whether a true belief is knowledge is not merely a matter of supporting beliefs or reliability; in the case of knowledge, practical rationality and theoretical rationality are intertwined. Stanley defends this thesis against alternative accounts of the phenomena that motivate it, such as the claim that knowledge attributions are linguistically context-sensitive (contextualism about knowledge attributions), and the claim that the truth of a knowledge claim is somehow relative to the person making the claim (relativism about knowledge).

Английский