The main “ism” in recent theory of knowledge that we haven’t studied so far is contextualism. The basic idea goes back several decades, but it has continued to be a topic of discussion. DeRose was one of the early proponents of the view, but we will discuss a relatively recent paper of his in which he tries to defend contextualism by allying it with an idea from Williamson.
There is a fairly natural break in the paper between sections 2.1 and 2.2. (By that point DeRose has assembled all the ideas he will go to apply in the latter part of the paper.) So you should read at least up to that point, pp. 167-181, for Tues.
Even though it is part of a long-standing controversy, the discussion in the paper is relatively self-contained. It does presuppose one idea from the philosophy of language, that of implicature (which some of you will have encountered in logic). An implicature of a claim is something that is required for the assertion of the claim to be appropriate, or as DeRose will put it, warranted. Failure of an implicature will not make the claim false but will make its assertion out of place, and that is enough for an assertion to carry its implicatures as suggestions. For example, in most contexts, the assertion There is a car in your driveway would be appropriate only if the car is not the speaker’s, so someone saying this would suggest that the car is not theirs; but the sentence is certainly seems true when the car is the speaker’s.
For Tues.
• Section 1.1 is DeRose’s main presentation of the idea of contextualism. Since that is as important for our purposes as the way he defends it, we are likely to spend a significant amount of time on this part of the paper.
• §§1.2-1.5 present the objection DeRose will defend contextualism against. An initial objection is stated in §1.2, and §§1.3-1.4 serve both as a reply to this as an introduction to an objection, stated in §1.5, that is designed to be immune to this initial reply. His response to this objection, the “generality” objection, occupies the rest of the paper. (The subscripted variable Pind that begins to appear in §1.4 is explained in note 13, p. 197; the subscript places a constraint on the range of sentences that can replace P in sentences of the form “It’s possible that Pind.”)
• §2.1 introduces the connection between knowledge and warranted assertability that is the basis for DeRose’s response to the generality objection.
For Thurs.
• Sections 2.2-2.4 concern the connection between the “knowledge account of assertion” and contextualism.
• The arguments of §2 of the paper are implicitly a response to the generality objection, but DeRose replies to this objection more directly in §3.1. The concluding §3.2 then looks at the nature of this response and argues that it can serve as a response to any similar objection.