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Knowledge and Social Roles: A Virtue Approach

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 January 2012

Sarah Wright
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Abstract

Attributor contextualism and subject-sensitive invariantism both suggest ways in which our concept of knowledge depends on a context. Both offer approaches that incorporate traditionally non-epistemic elements into our standards for knowledge. But neither can account for the fact that the social role of a subject affects the standards that the subject must meet in order to warrant a knowledge attribution. I illustrate the dependence of the standards for knowledge on the social roles of the knower with three types of examples–focusing on knowledge attribution, action, and a mix of the two–and show why neither attributor contextualism nor subject-sensitive invariantism can explain them. I then suggest that subject-sensitive invariantism should be supplemented with insights from virtue epistemology so that it can explain the dependence of the standards of knowledge on social roles. This supplementation of subject-sensitive invariantism helps to solve a persistent problem facing that theory: the case of knowledge attributions made by those in high-stakes contexts about subjects in low-stakes contexts.

Type
Research Article
Information
Episteme , Volume 8 , Issue 1 , February 2011 , pp. 99 - 111
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2011

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