epistemic contextualism

Annis “Contextual Theory of Justification”

a/o/t = as opposed to; w/r/t = with respect to

The main idea Annis puts forth is an alternative to the alleged dualism of foundationalism an coherentism. His alternative is what he calls the “contextual theory of epistemic justification.” If someone claims to know some statement is true, then the possible objections are that either the person is in no position to know, or that the claim asserted is false.

The doubt needed to bring forth a real objection must be of the “real” kind as characterized by Charles Peirce a/o/t a Cartesian ‘paper’ doubt. So if the doubt is real it has to be a local doubt a/o/t a general skepticism.

Justification, Annis claims, is relative to the context of the issue raised. If a lay-person, in a common context has to justify some scientific claim, his remembering of someone else reading it in a secondary text at some point in the past, then, according to the context, he is justified in believing it. However, if the same issue is at hand at a graduate examination, then the method and depth of knowledge is presumed to be held at a higher standard of justification. At this point he says that the quest for an a priori method of justification is a misguided one, as justification is an activity which reflects the social nature of human activity.

However, all objections to a person’s claim to the knowledge of some statement must be motivated by the dual goals of obtaining truth and avoiding error, yet further, at the particular time of consideration. These conditions have to be in place to avoid Annis falling into an objective standard of justification, where otherwise future evidence against the claim of a person’s knowing something might also fall into the present objections.

Further, theories of justification have to be naturalized because they deal with the naturally occurring social element of human behavior, relative to a given social group. Here the discussion of the Kpelle tribe relies heavily on the objection that the real doubters of a person’s claim to knowledge must be motivated by truth, so if the tribe elders’ predictions come to be false more often than true, their reason to object to their elder’s supposed knowledge is justified yet still contextual in a local sense.

To fight against the infinite regress argument yet not fall into a foundationalist theory of justification, Annis argues that there are no BASIC bits of knowledge as the foundationalist might argue, but there are some contextually basic bits of knowledge in a given issue-context when the hypothetical group of objectors would not require reasons for them.

The strong points this theory has, in my view, is that it agrees with the claim that if someone is justified in believing a statement, then they should be able to attempt to defend that statement against possible objections. It also seems to be a consequence of this theory that if someone believes to know something and not have adequate justification for it, they have something to lose. I agree with these points at a basic level.

However, the example of the tribe, and the example of the twins seem to rub me the wrong way. The tribe people should accept higher standards of justification when there’s more at stake than something trivial, if their elders tend to be wrong. But I’m still not sure if this means that the standards of justification then don’t just rely on some context-relative schema, or if the schema itself should shift from a system of epistemological justification not-so-rigorous to one that is more rigorous w/r/t justification (even though it’s still context-dependent).