None of the prior discussion reflects an understanding of ‘contextualism’ as standardly conceived by philosophers (if the Stanford Encyclopedia exposition is representative of philosophers’ views). So I suspect the polling data for this question will need to be tossed out. Here’s a clearer explanation of the difference between these doctrines:
contextualism = The semantic thesis that ‘x knows y’ may vary in truth-value depending on the social and psychological status of the knowledge-attributor. I.e., ‘x knows y’ often or always fails to have a determinate truth-value, unless it is clear from context that we are really saying ‘x knows y relative to evaluator z,’ where z is someone evaluating ‘does x know y?’ Thus, a better name for ‘contextualism’ would be ‘attributor contextualism’ (which it has indeed been called).
Note that contextualism does not imply that the distribution of knowledge in the world is arbitrary or just a matter of subjective opinion; there may be very strict constraints on what sorts of ‘subjective opinions’ held by an evaluator affect knowledge-relative-to-an-evaluator. For instance, it is plausible that ‘I know I have hands’ would count as true if the evaluator were your psychiatrist, but would count as false if the evaluator were someone with whom you were debating the Simulation Hypothesis. That’s not because of the evaluator’s mere opinions; it’s because there are higher standards for knowledge in metaphysical debates than in everyday conversation. An evaluator with crazy, unrealistic standards wouldn’t have his/her own, equally legitimate beliefs about what counts as knowledge; s/he would just be consistently in error.
Nor is contextualism a meta-semantic claim about how the word ‘knowledge’ varies across linguistic communities; rather, it is the semantic claim that ‘knowledge’ in all (standard-English-speaking) contexts would frequently be judged to vary based on the state of the evaluator. Contextualism could turn out to be false for purely empirical reasons, if, say, sociological data proved that we don’t vary in knowledge-attribution based on the mental state and social context of the attributor.
relativism = The metaphysical thesis that knowledge as such is relative to a standard of assessment. Like contextualists, relativists think ‘know’ is three-place; but their relation is ‘x knows y according to standard z,’ not ‘x knows y relative to evaluator z.’ And whereas there are presumably facts about which agent is evaluating a knowledge-claim in the real world, there are no facts about which standard is the ‘right’ one; so there simply are no facts about knowledge, or even about knowledge-according-to-an-agent. What there are are facts about ‘what certain standards treat as being “knowledge”’.
I said that relativism is a ‘metaphysical’ view, not a semantic one. This is important. Contextualism can be refuted if it turns out that the English language is invariantist; but relativism can’t be so easily refuted, since their claim is not that we think of knowledge as relative, but that knowledge really is relative. Relativism is very close to radical skepticism, just with ‘knowledge’-talk preserved as a way of signaling one’s chosen standards. Whereas contextualism is just as opposed to skepticism as is invariantism. Speaking of which...
invariantism = The claim that we have knowledge of some things, combined with the semantic thesis that contextualism is false and the metaphysical thesis that relativism is false. According to an invariantist, ‘I know I have hands’ is either true or false simpliciter; evaluators and standards-of-evaluation might disagree about this statement’s truth-value, but that’s because some evaluators and some standards are wrong, not because ‘knowledge’ itself is unsaturated.
In your discussion of contextualism, you are conflating “evaluator” and “attributor”, I think. An attributor is someone who makes a knowledge-claim, i.e. attributes knowledge of some proposition to someone (including, possibly, to himself). An evaluator is someone who judges the truth of the knowledge-claim made by the attributor. So if you say “I know I have hands” to a psychologist, you are the attributor, not the psychologist. You are the one making the knowledge-claim (about yourself, in this case). The psychologist is the evaluator, and according to contextualism she will (or possibly should) evaluate your claim according to your context, not her own. So if the psychologist hears about you making the claim in the context of a discussion of the Simulation argument, she should probably judge it false, irrespective of the context in which she is situated at the time she is making the evaluation.
I believe this agrees more or less with the definition (and discussion) above. Your definitions of relativism and invariance seem to agree with mine.
In your discussion of contextualism, you are conflating “evaluator” and “attributor”, I think.
I wasn’t aware that there was an established distinction between the two. Thanks for the information! Though nothing of great weight can rest on it, since:
Every attributor is a (self-)evaluator. Asserting ‘p’ is equivalent to asserting ‘p is true’.
Every evaluator is an attributor. To determine that some attributor’s knowledge-claim is true or false, one must oneself attribute knowledge (or lack thereof) to the relevant agent.
if you say “I know I have hands” to a psychologist, you are the attributor, not the psychologist.
Yes. But if the psychologist evaluates your claim, by weighing in on its truth or falsehood, then the psychologist becomes a distinct attributor. I varied the psychologist or metaphysician as attributor, rather than paying much mind to self-attribution/self-evaluation, simply because I thought it would be less intuitive to talk about a person’s knowledge-claims failing to meet his or her own psychological/social state. But, sure, strictly speaking I could have just varied the psychological state of someone self-attributing knowledge, and thereby made that person’s own beliefs about his/her knowledge true or false. (At least, I think standard contextualist theories allow this.)
So if the psychologist hears about you making the claim in the context of a discussion of the Simulation argument, she should probably judge it false, irrespective of the context in which she is situated at the time she is making the evaluation.
Interesting. I think it’s more complicated than that. For instance, I think contextualism predicts that the psychologist, in a later dinner conversation with a metaphysician friend, might say: ‘Earlier I told a patient that he knew he had hands; but, of course, really he doesn’t have hands.’ The contextualist interprets this as meaning that the psychologist’s state has importantly changed, hence her knowledge-attributions have changed, hence her knowledge-evaluations have changed. (Presumably part of the reason the psychologist’s knowledge-attributions have changed in this case is that she’s in a social context that includes a metaphysician with psychologically embedded ‘higher standards’. I.e., contextualism predicts that social overlap produces synchronizations in correct knowledge attribution.)
Note that an invariantist might interpret the same data very differently. A relatively skeptical invariantist could suggest that the psychologist was speaking loosely, not-quite-correctly, when she said ‘Yes, you have hands.’ Or a relatively Moorean invariantist could suggest that the psychologist became too hyperskeptical in the face of social pressure from the metaphysician. On the other hand, a relativist would suggest that there isn’t any determinate answer to whether ‘Yes, you have hands.’ was right, nor to whether ‘No, he didn’t have hands’ was. Even stipulating all the contextual facts underdetermines whether knowledge is present.
None of the prior discussion reflects an understanding of ‘contextualism’ as standardly conceived by philosophers (if the Stanford Encyclopedia exposition is representative of philosophers’ views). So I suspect the polling data for this question will need to be tossed out. Here’s a clearer explanation of the difference between these doctrines:
contextualism = The semantic thesis that ‘x knows y’ may vary in truth-value depending on the social and psychological status of the knowledge-attributor. I.e., ‘x knows y’ often or always fails to have a determinate truth-value, unless it is clear from context that we are really saying ‘x knows y relative to evaluator z,’ where z is someone evaluating ‘does x know y?’ Thus, a better name for ‘contextualism’ would be ‘attributor contextualism’ (which it has indeed been called).
Note that contextualism does not imply that the distribution of knowledge in the world is arbitrary or just a matter of subjective opinion; there may be very strict constraints on what sorts of ‘subjective opinions’ held by an evaluator affect knowledge-relative-to-an-evaluator. For instance, it is plausible that ‘I know I have hands’ would count as true if the evaluator were your psychiatrist, but would count as false if the evaluator were someone with whom you were debating the Simulation Hypothesis. That’s not because of the evaluator’s mere opinions; it’s because there are higher standards for knowledge in metaphysical debates than in everyday conversation. An evaluator with crazy, unrealistic standards wouldn’t have his/her own, equally legitimate beliefs about what counts as knowledge; s/he would just be consistently in error.
Nor is contextualism a meta-semantic claim about how the word ‘knowledge’ varies across linguistic communities; rather, it is the semantic claim that ‘knowledge’ in all (standard-English-speaking) contexts would frequently be judged to vary based on the state of the evaluator. Contextualism could turn out to be false for purely empirical reasons, if, say, sociological data proved that we don’t vary in knowledge-attribution based on the mental state and social context of the attributor.
relativism = The metaphysical thesis that knowledge as such is relative to a standard of assessment. Like contextualists, relativists think ‘know’ is three-place; but their relation is ‘x knows y according to standard z,’ not ‘x knows y relative to evaluator z.’ And whereas there are presumably facts about which agent is evaluating a knowledge-claim in the real world, there are no facts about which standard is the ‘right’ one; so there simply are no facts about knowledge, or even about knowledge-according-to-an-agent. What there are are facts about ‘what certain standards treat as being “knowledge”’.
I said that relativism is a ‘metaphysical’ view, not a semantic one. This is important. Contextualism can be refuted if it turns out that the English language is invariantist; but relativism can’t be so easily refuted, since their claim is not that we think of knowledge as relative, but that knowledge really is relative. Relativism is very close to radical skepticism, just with ‘knowledge’-talk preserved as a way of signaling one’s chosen standards. Whereas contextualism is just as opposed to skepticism as is invariantism. Speaking of which...
invariantism = The claim that we have knowledge of some things, combined with the semantic thesis that contextualism is false and the metaphysical thesis that relativism is false. According to an invariantist, ‘I know I have hands’ is either true or false simpliciter; evaluators and standards-of-evaluation might disagree about this statement’s truth-value, but that’s because some evaluators and some standards are wrong, not because ‘knowledge’ itself is unsaturated.
Source for all this: Rysiew, “Relativism and Contextualism”.
In your discussion of contextualism, you are conflating “evaluator” and “attributor”, I think. An attributor is someone who makes a knowledge-claim, i.e. attributes knowledge of some proposition to someone (including, possibly, to himself). An evaluator is someone who judges the truth of the knowledge-claim made by the attributor. So if you say “I know I have hands” to a psychologist, you are the attributor, not the psychologist. You are the one making the knowledge-claim (about yourself, in this case). The psychologist is the evaluator, and according to contextualism she will (or possibly should) evaluate your claim according to your context, not her own. So if the psychologist hears about you making the claim in the context of a discussion of the Simulation argument, she should probably judge it false, irrespective of the context in which she is situated at the time she is making the evaluation.
I believe this agrees more or less with the definition (and discussion) above. Your definitions of relativism and invariance seem to agree with mine.
I wasn’t aware that there was an established distinction between the two. Thanks for the information! Though nothing of great weight can rest on it, since:
Every attributor is a (self-)evaluator. Asserting ‘p’ is equivalent to asserting ‘p is true’.
Every evaluator is an attributor. To determine that some attributor’s knowledge-claim is true or false, one must oneself attribute knowledge (or lack thereof) to the relevant agent.
Yes. But if the psychologist evaluates your claim, by weighing in on its truth or falsehood, then the psychologist becomes a distinct attributor. I varied the psychologist or metaphysician as attributor, rather than paying much mind to self-attribution/self-evaluation, simply because I thought it would be less intuitive to talk about a person’s knowledge-claims failing to meet his or her own psychological/social state. But, sure, strictly speaking I could have just varied the psychological state of someone self-attributing knowledge, and thereby made that person’s own beliefs about his/her knowledge true or false. (At least, I think standard contextualist theories allow this.)
Interesting. I think it’s more complicated than that. For instance, I think contextualism predicts that the psychologist, in a later dinner conversation with a metaphysician friend, might say: ‘Earlier I told a patient that he knew he had hands; but, of course, really he doesn’t have hands.’ The contextualist interprets this as meaning that the psychologist’s state has importantly changed, hence her knowledge-attributions have changed, hence her knowledge-evaluations have changed. (Presumably part of the reason the psychologist’s knowledge-attributions have changed in this case is that she’s in a social context that includes a metaphysician with psychologically embedded ‘higher standards’. I.e., contextualism predicts that social overlap produces synchronizations in correct knowledge attribution.)
Note that an invariantist might interpret the same data very differently. A relatively skeptical invariantist could suggest that the psychologist was speaking loosely, not-quite-correctly, when she said ‘Yes, you have hands.’ Or a relatively Moorean invariantist could suggest that the psychologist became too hyperskeptical in the face of social pressure from the metaphysician. On the other hand, a relativist would suggest that there isn’t any determinate answer to whether ‘Yes, you have hands.’ was right, nor to whether ‘No, he didn’t have hands’ was. Even stipulating all the contextual facts underdetermines whether knowledge is present.