Author(s)

Jing Li^1,2

Affiliation(s)

¹Rearch Center of Norm and Cognition on Marxism, Xiamen University, Xiamen 361000, Fujian, China.

²School of Humanities, Fujian University of Technology, Fuzhou 350011, Fujian, China.

Corresponding Author

Jing Li

ABSTRACT

Empirical studies in experimental epistemology show that folk knowledge attribution is influenced by practical factors such as morality, aesthetics, and interests. Through the iterative design of the Knobe cases, it is demonstrated that side-effect of an action can affect the result of knowledge attribution. Specifically, evaluators believe that epistemic agents know the consequences of harmful actions but not the consequences of beneficial actions. Even agents without justification and true belief or in Getterized scenario, people still believe that S knows p. However, mainstream epistemologists maintain that whether an epistemic agent knows p is independent of the nature of the event, the content of belief, and their expectations. To reconcile the conflict between practical factors and intellectualism, this paper is further argued that the consideration of practical factors triggers the assessor's evaluative attitude towards proposition p, affecting the assessor's judgment on the strength of the agent's epistemic state, and thus indirectly affects the truth value of the knowledge attribution sentence.

KEYWORDS

Knowledge attribution; Epistemic side-effect effect; Practical factors; Generalized contextualism

CITE THIS PAPER

Jing Li. Practical sensitivity in folk knowledge attribution: generalized contextualism. Journal of Religion, Ethics, and Philosophy. 2025, 2(1): 24-29. DOI: https://doi.org/10.61784/jrep3007.

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