St Andrews Research Repository

View Item 
  •   St Andrews Research Repository
  • Philosophical, Anthropological & Film Studies (School of)
  • Philosophy
  • Philosophy Theses
  • View Item
  •   St Andrews Research Repository
  • Philosophical, Anthropological & Film Studies (School of)
  • Philosophy
  • Philosophy Theses
  • View Item
  •   St Andrews Research Repository
  • Philosophical, Anthropological & Film Studies (School of)
  • Philosophy
  • Philosophy Theses
  • View Item
  • Login
JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

Knowledge, chance, and contrast

View/Open
PaulDimmockPhDThesis.pdf (1.733Mb)
Date
30/11/2012
Author
Dimmock, Paul
Supervisor
Brown, Jessica (Jessica Anne)
Greenough, Patrick
Metadata
Show full item record
Abstract
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.
Type
Thesis, PhD Doctor of Philosophy
Collections
  • Philosophy Theses
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/3202

Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.

Advanced Search

Browse

All of RepositoryCommunities & CollectionsBy Issue DateNamesTitlesSubjectsClassificationTypeFunderThis CollectionBy Issue DateNamesTitlesSubjectsClassificationTypeFunder

My Account

Login

Open Access

To find out how you can benefit from open access to research, see our library web pages and Open Access blog. For open access help contact: openaccess@st-andrews.ac.uk.

How to submit research papers

The full text of research papers can be submitted to the repository via PURE, the University's research information system. For help see our guide: How to deposit in Pure.

Electronic thesis deposit

Help with deposit.

Repository help

For repository help contact: Digital-Repository@st-andrews.ac.uk.

Give Feedback

Cookie policy

This site may use cookies. Please see Terms and Conditions.

Usage statistics

COUNTER-compliant statistics on downloads from the repository are available from the IRUS-UK Service. Contact us for information.

© University of St Andrews Library

University of St Andrews is a charity registered in Scotland, No SC013532.

  • Facebook
  • Twitter