Contextualism, Multi-Tasking, andThird-Person Knowledge Reports:A Note on Keith DeRose’s TheCase for Contextualism1

peter ludlow

Northwestern University

In the mid-90’s, beginning with his seminal paper ‘‘Solving the Skep-

tical Problem,’’ and in a series of subsequent papers, Keith DeRose

became a key figure defending the doctrine of contextualism in episte-

mology. Behind DeRose’s unrelenting series of arguments, contex-

tualism came to be viewed as one of the principle candidate answers to

the skeptical problem.

The traditional skeptic, recall, challenges our claims of knowledge

(for example, my claim that I know I have hands) by asking how we

know that we aren’t being deceived by an evil demon, or in more

recent incarnations, that we aren’t brains in vats being deceived by an

evil scientist. If you can’t know you are not a brain in a vat, then how

can you know you have hands?

Contextualists approach the theory of knowledge by studying the

nature of knowledge attributions—in effect, by examining our linguistic

practice of attributing knowledge to people in different contexts.

According to a contextualist like DeRose, these linguistic practices sug-

gest that there isn’t a single standard of knowledge, but rather there

are higher and lower thresholds for knowledge depending upon our

context. In a casual conversation in a bar our standards of knowledge

might be very low. In a courtroom the standards will be much higher.

In an epistemology class they might be even higher. The relevant stan-

dard of knowledge is usually taken to depend upon the context of the

person who is reporting the knowledge state.

1 Thanks to Jason Stanley for discussion.

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This offers an answer to the skeptic; the person who denies we know

we have hands is sometimes right, but only in contained artificial

circumstances, and our knowledge claims are otherwise preserved.

More importantly, though, the proposal allows us to think about the

nature of knowledge in each different setting (court of law, scientific

laboratory, etc) and thus offers a research program in which episte-

mology is intimately connected with the individual sciences and social

institutions. There is no single static standard of knowledge, but a

sliding scale along which there might be different standards of knowl-

edge for different institutions and activities.

The idea is certainly compelling, but in the past decade there has

been significant pushback against contextualism in general and against

DeRose’s version of contextualism in particular. The Case for Contex-

tualism is part one of DeRose’s two volume response to these critics. In

this first volume, DeRose addresses concerns that his analysis of

knowledge attributions has got things wrong. Thus, this volume could

be considered a work in philosophy of language as much as it is a

work in epistemology.

DeRose covers a broad range of attacks on contextualism in this

volume, but one gets the clear sense that he is most concerned about a

competing position known as subject-sensitive invariantism (SSI), and in

particular with two recent books targeting DeRose’s work: John Haw-

thorne’s Knowledge and Lotteries (2004) and Jason Stanley’s Knowledge

and Practical Interests (2005) (Stanley calls it interest-relative invarian-

tism).

The basic thesis of SSI is that the truth of knowledge attributions is

not sensitive to the conversational context of the speaker who is mak-

ing the knowledge attribution but is rather sensitive to the ‘‘practical

interests’’ of the subject to whom the knowledge is being attributed.

In effect: high stakes interests undermine knowledge by driving up the

epistemic standards relevant in those practical situations and low stakes

interests make it easier for us to have knowledge.

To illustrate, whether or not I can say I know that some O-rings

won’t crack under low temperature may depend on whether they are

going to be deployed in a low stakes situation (as beer can stabilizers

for our ice fishing trip on Lake Wobegon) or a high stakes situation

(e.g., if they are used in the space shuttle). This view is considered

‘‘invariantist’’ because the epistemic vocabulary (which includes words

like ‘know’) expresses the same properties and relations in every

context of attribution. Whether the relations hold of a person and a

proposition at a time depends on the stakes in play for the agent to

whom the knowledge is attributed. It is a consequence of this view that

if our O-rings are to be used in the space shuttle, then we either know

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or we don’t know they are stable under low temperatures, and it

doesn’t matter if we (or others) are talking about the issue in an episte-

mology class, a courtroom, or a bar.

A good portion of The Case for Contextualism is devoted to defend-

ing contextualism from the attacks of Hawthorne and Stanley and

others, and the defense is certainly capable and well worth exploring in

detail. In this note, however, I am more interested in what happens

when DeRose goes on the offensive against SSI—in particular with two

arguments that DeRose makes against SSI in chapter 7 of his book. I

will briefly describe these arguments and then offer some further discus-

sion about possible responses for the defenders of SSI. This is not to

say I am siding with the SSIers. My sympathies remain with the con-

textualist; I just think that there are possibilities in the move space that

have not been fully explored by DeRose.

The first argument is what I would call the third-person perspective

argument. The idea behind this argument is that the usual epistemology

thought experiments concern first person knowledge attributions, and

that if we consider third person knowledge attribution cases the case

does not look so good for SSI.

Suppose, for example that an engineer (let’s call her Angie) is asked

by another engineer (Frank) whether she knows that the O-rings sitting

on her desk will not become brittle in low temperatures. She, thinking

that the O-rings are for her ice fishing trip, might not hesitate to say

that yes she does know. Indeed, ice fishing might be her salient practi-

cal interest at the moment. But suppose that when Frank asked Angie

if she knows that the O-rings can withstand low temperatures,

unknown to her, he was asking on behalf of his boss, whose interest

concerns their possible use in the space shuttle. Angie may not know

they are to be used in the shuttle. If Frank reports to his boss that she

does know they are safe we may well take his report to be false,

grounded in an unfortunate misunderstanding.

Hawthorne and Stanley are not unaware of such cases; Stanley

called such cases ‘‘ignorant high stakes.’’ Stanley’s view is that she is

not fully aware of her practical interests in this instance; she is in a

high stakes situation so she doesn’t know that the O-rings are safe. The

question is whether this answer is sufficient or whether cases like this

present a problem for SSI. Here matters get subtle, because there is

a very serious question of how broadly we can individuate Angie’s

practical interests and be credible. Can something really be part of

Angie’s practical interests if she doesn’t even know about the intended

application?

The danger of course, is that the SSIer runs the risk of diluting the

meaning of ‘practical interest’ to the point where Angie’s practical

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interests become whatever it takes to line up with our knowledge attri-

bution practices.

What is needed then is some compelling independent notion of prac-

tical interest that can be articulated independently of our reporting

practices. It is useful to explore some possibilities here.

Consider a military scenario in which Lieutenant Smith is given an

assignment that appears to be low stakes, but which in fact is high

stakes. That is, the Lieutenant may be charged with securing some food

supplies. Higher up the chain of command, however, it is known that

the supplies are going to be needed for a critical battle. In such a case

it does not seem odd to think that the practical interests of the Lieuten-

ant are more significant than she realizes.

In this case we could say that the practical interests of Lieutenant

Smith are determined by the interests of the institution to which she

belongs. The army’s practical interests are her practical interests. She

probably actually knows this too, so that the stakes involved in any

military objective are not the stakes that are known to her, but rather

the stakes as they are known higher up the chain of command.

In the case of our engineer Angie and the O-rings the case is only

marginally different. If Angie is working for an institution that needs

to ensure that the O-rings perform successfully in a shuttle mission,

then those are her high stakes too—at least when she is in the office.

The idea then is that we could come up with a systematic account of

practical interests broadly understood by embedding the practical

interests of the individual knower within the practical interests of an

institution or organization for which they are agents.

Not all such cases involve institutions. Sometimes they involve plans

that we may not know we are part of. Suppose for example that we

are playing a defuse-the-bomb game where we must cut colored wires

in the right order or a buzzer goes off and we lose the game. Let’s say

that Barry is very good at the game, but that unbeknownst to Barry,

the game is now wired up to a nuclear weapon. If he cuts the wires in

the wrong order, Ann Arbor will be annihilated. Here third parties

might well say that Barry doesn’t know the correct order (he does get

it wrong sometimes, after all). But again, we judge in this way because

we know that Barry is part of a much bigger game than he realizes.

His plan to cut the wires in the right order turns out to be part of a

superplan that involves cutting the wires in the right order so that

Ann Arbor isn’t nuked.

What happens if the person does not play a role in the relevant

organization or institution and the judgment is not part of a bigger

plan? Here I think the intuitions start to break in different directions.

Suppose that Pat is a mail carrier that delivers mail to the O-ring

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maker, and while on a delivery Pat grabs a couple of O-rings and uses

them as beer coasters on her ice fishing trips. Pat might return and

announce to the engineers that ‘‘those O-rings really hold up under low

temperatures.’’ It would be a bit stingy to deny that Pat was not

expressing a legitimate piece of knowledge, even as she is addressing a

groups of engineers tasked with making O-rings for the shuttle. Pat has

her own stakes; she needn’t take on those of this institution. Nor does

she play a role in their plan. If the boss asks Frank if Pat knows the

O-rings are stable at low temperatures, Frank will either say ‘‘yes’’, or

else take the boss to be delusional for thinking that Pat is concerned

with or in a position to know about shuttle mission specs.

Of course we can make these cases even more subtle. Suppose that

our engineer Angie has fishing buddies that are not employees at her

engineering firm. What happens if she is talking to her fishing buddies

about the elite new beer coasters she brought them, and she assures

them they will not fail during the upcoming Lake Wobegon fishing

tournament. But now suppose she does this while at the same time tex-

ting the engineers about O-ring quality control back at the factory.

Cases like this lead us to DeRose’s second argument argument against

SSI.

Let’s call this the Multitasking Argument. DeRose points out that we

often have competing practical interests at the same time. DeRose’s

example goes like this. Suppose I am walking to an office to sign up

for free life insurance for next year, while at the same time I am on my

cell phone with a friend discussing my future plans, and I say ‘‘I know

I will be in my new office in Snodgrass Hall next year’’. But if I know

I am going to be in Snodgrass Hall then why am I walking over to sign

up for life insurance? That doesn’t seem particularly rational—or

rather, it appears to unhook the rationality of my actions with from

my knowledge states (an SSI proponent wants to keep the two linked).

DeRose thinks this makes a good case against SSI, but I am not so

sure. In the first place, the example seems to be problematic for the con-

textualist too. DeRose, after all, has argued against Dretske’s closure

principle by saying that it leads to ‘‘the abominable conjuction’’—the

possibility that we can truly assert something like ‘‘I have hands but

I don’t know I’m not a brain in a vat.’’ Contextualism is supposed to

avoid such cases because the context is supposed to remain stable

through the utterance.

The problem is that there seems to be something ‘‘abominable’’

about the multitasking case for the contextualist—let’s call it ‘‘Abomi-

nable Multitasking’’. What is abominable is that I might be engaged in

a fully rational action—say walking to get free life insurance for next

year, while at the same time saying on my cell phone that I know I will

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be around in a year. My utterance undermines the very rational task

that I am engaged in (walking to the office where I can get insurance).

It doesn’t seem to help so much that two different contexts are in

play—the problem is that the contexts overlap (basically the same

problem that led to the abominable conjunctions—having two different

contexts in a single sentence).

Lewis discussed a similar multitasking case in ‘‘Elusive Know-

ledge’’—and his suggestion might provide a way out for both the

contextualist and the SSIer. In Lewis’s example, we are engaged in a

discussion about skepticism as we are walking to our car. Our dis-

cussion about skeptical scenarios is supposed to undermine our know-

ledge, but at the same time it seems to be right to say that as we are

walking and talking about skeptical scenarios we know where our car

is. In this case, Lewis suggests that we are engaged in a kind of com-

partmentalization—so that in one compartment I have knowledge of

where my car is, but in the other compartment I do not.

Lewis then makes a classical Lewisian proposal:

I suggest that we might take not the whole compartmentalized thin-

ker, but rather each of his several overlapping compartments, as our‘subjects’. That would be the obvious remedy if his compartmentaliza-tion amounted to a case of multiple personality disorder; but maybe itis right for milder cases as well. (p. 236 in DeRose and Warfield 1999)

Lewis’ idea is programmatic to say the least, but one direction we

could take this would be to say that knowers aren’t unified Cartesian

egos, but rather epistemic agents that are in some sense subpersonal.

The details of this are a bit tricky if we want to link knowledge to rea-

son and action—basically all of these would have to be run at the sub-

personal level too, with the net effect that basically everything happens

on the subpersonal level—which I suppose is to say that the traditional

personal level needs to be rejected altogether. I’m not saying that this

line of thought is wildly implausible, but I do think that it is ambi-

tious.

It is worth noting that something like this could work just as well

for the contextualist, helping her to avoid abominable multi-tasking. I

simply have different compartments in different contexts (this, presum-

ably, is what Lewis thought).

What is particularly interesting is thinking about what happens when

we put the response to the third person perspective argument together

with the response to the multitasking argument. We seem to end up

with knowing agents that are at once subpersonal (compartments) and

yet individuated with respect to large institutions and organizations (or

at least their interests are so individuated). This is bad news for the

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Cartesian, since both Descartes’ egoism and his individualism are on

the ropes. The interesting question is whether one can keep such a view

of knowledge hooked up to the theory of action (as the SSIer must)

and if so what that theory or action would look like.

How often have we read books or papers that are point-by-point

rebuttals of opponents and then thought to ourselves that the research

program was starting to go stale? DeRose has been fighting the good

fight for contextualism for over 15 years, and this is a point by point

rebuttal in some measure, but my sense is that it is also something else.

Whether by design or serendipity the proposals and challenges offered

up in this book don’t look like dead end paths. To the contrary,

it looks like they lead to some very interesting and largely unexplored

territory in epistemology, and it also looks like the exchanges between

DeRose and his opponents are about to change epistemology in funda-

mental ways. This is a good thing.

Bibliography

Hawthorne, J., 2004. Knowledge and Lotteries. Oxford: Oxford Univer-

sity Press.

Lewis, D., 1996. ‘‘Elusive Knowledge.’’ Australasian Journal of Philoso-

phy 74, pp. 549–567. Reprinted in K. DeRose and T. Warfield

(eds.), Skepticism: A Contemporary Reader. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1999, 220–242.

Stanley, J. 2005. Knowledge and Practical Interests. Oxford: Oxford

University Press.

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