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Page 1: I know what i know, if you know what i mean

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Social Epistemology: A Journal ofKnowledge, Culture and PolicyPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tsep20

I know what i know, if you knowwhat i meanJane Duran aa Department of Philosophy , University of California ,Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, USAPublished online: 19 Jun 2008.

To cite this article: Jane Duran (1991) I know what i know, if you know what i mean,Social Epistemology: A Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Policy, 5:2, 151-159, DOI:10.1080/02691729108578610

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02691729108578610

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SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY, 1 9 9 1 , VOL. 5, NO. 2, 1 5 1 - 1 5 9

An application

I know what I know, if you know what Imean

JANE DURAN

Emphasis on pragamatics as a subarea of philosophy of language or linguistics seems tobecome more pronounced as time goes on. Recurring disputes about the usage ofterms in conversational contexts reminds us of the importance of speech-act theory,sociolinguistics, attention to genre, and so forth. None of the foregoing areas lendsitself to the rigorous and exquisitely sophisticated theorizing of semantics, for example,but one might be inclined to say that this is all to the good, remembering that it ispragmatics, not semantics, which speaks to the intersection of concerns of philosophyof language and concerns of everyday life.

Recently, two new lines of endeavor in metatheory seem to have left traditionalanalytic epistemology rather profoundly shaken. The first, and perhaps more obvious,line is that which asks us to naturalize epistemology; a spate of books and journalarticles attests to its importance and, indeed, its popularity.1 The second line is only nowcoming to the fore, it being not as obviously related. I refer to feminist theory, and itsimpact on epistemology and philosophy of science.2 But if we can naturalizeepistemology, at least to some extent, by referring to advances in cognitive science,empirical data about knowledge acquisition and brain functioning, and so forth, we canalso create an intersection between feminist concerns and naturalized work, byreferring to particular indices of the knower or knowledge agent, such as gender, class,ethnicity and so forth.

My concern here is not to further that particular line of inquiry, since a great deal isalready being done there. It is intriguing, however, that the very sorts of concerns thefeminist exhibits with regard to philosophy of science and or epistemology broadlyconstrued are similar to those manifested by the naturalizing epistemologist, and thatboth, as I shall argue, can profit by attention to pragmatics and the intentionality oflanguage.

In general, my argument will be that insufficient attention has been paid to work insociolinguistics, or speech-act theory itself, for that matter, which allows us tocontextualize the process of knowledge acquisition or epistemic justification with thesort of empirical data with regard to language use which are now available. A host ofvolumes in the social sciences concerned with language offers itself for our perusal;3 theenterprising philosopher of language who wishes to investigate this area can hardlyclaim that not enough work has been done. I plan, then, to make the positive argument

Author: Jane Duran, Department of Philosophy, University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara,CA 93106, USA.

0269-1728/91 $3.00 © 1991 Taylor & Francis Ltd.

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that the naturalizing epistemologist (and indeed, perhaps, the naturalizing philosopherof science, or other naturalizing philosopher) can utilize the new work in pragmatics tovery great effect; I also plan to spend some time arguing against the by now standardrejoinder that material which aids us in identifying the framework of the agent orspeaker impedes our construction of the view from nowhere. The first part of mypositive argument will examine some material from sociolinguistics and speech-acttheory which reminds us of the extent to which the canons of logic and normativetheorizing in general are divorced from the context of daily behavior.

I

One's experience teaching undergraduate philosophy classes, however unhappy,cannot be without its intellectual fruits, and one is sometimes tempted to think thatattempting to get students to do correctly structured derivations is not merely anexercise in futility but an exercise profoundly revelatory of defects in human cognition.Interestingly enough, there is available to us today evidence which not onlycorroborates (at least weakly) such a jaded view, but which allows for us to make otherinferences with regard to cognition as well. For it turns out, as we might well havesuspected, that the pragmatics of syllogistic reasoning is completely divorced from thesemantic considerations which seem to enter into it, and the capacity for syllogisticreasoning, at least insofar as postulated or hypothetical topics are concerned, isacquired.4

This information is useful not only for the harried instructor of undergraduate logic,but also for philosophers engaged in other philosophical pursuits, for it indicatessomething quite important about our powers of reasoning in general. Consider thefollowing fact: the Russian researcher Luria, and more contemporary investigatorssuch as Michael Cole and Sylvia Scribner, have shown that it is extremely difficult (insome cases, almost impossible) for persons not having had at least two or three years offormal education to reason syllogistically, at least insofar as the syllogisms constructedhave to do with hypothetical material. Why? Because there appears to be a strongpropensity—cross-cultural and intra-cultural-to reason only about that with which oneis empirically acquainted, unless one has been formally educated to such a level that thistendency can be overcome. Scribner writes:

Of the many issues relating to culture and thought which have been a matter of scholarly concern in thelast century, the question of whether industrialized and traditional people share the same logicalprocesses has provoked the most bitter controversy...

In all cultures, populations designated as traditional or nonliterate have just somewhat better than achance solution rate across all types of [syllogistic] problem material...

Luria's (1976) transcripts have many such examples drawn from interviews with nonliterateUzbekistanian women... To the problem: 'In the far north all bears are white; Novaya Zemyla is in thefar north. What color are the bears there?' the women often suggested, 'You should ask the people whohave been there and seen them'; 'We always speak of only what we see; we don't talk about what wehaven't seen'.5

Now the importance of an example like this lies not only in what it tells us about thosewho have received little formal education, for their behavior may not be directlyrelevant to the concerns which we address here. But still another important pointrevolves around a general human propensity to reason in terms of context, and the

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effects of context (even where context is defined in terms other than geographicality orlocality) on what purports to be more abstract or generalizable reasoning.

Scribner goes on to make the important point that it is not that the Uzbekistanians, orothers like them, cannot reason at all; they can reason syllogistically within the boundsof what they have experienced. What they have difficulty doing, apparently, isreasoning about that which is postulated rather than that which is already knownthrough the senses. In an effort to try to make the material more comprehensible, manytribespersons involved in the research cited by Scribner tried to remember people,places or things which had names similar to the hypothetical names employed in thesyllogisms constructed by the visiting anthropologists. They were then able to answerthe anthropologists' questions by 'correcting' them on the hypothetical material; as onerespondent put it, 'I don't know the man in person. I have not laid eyes on the manhimself.6

The Kpelle tribespeople with little or no formal education who tried to grapple withhypothetical questions about Boima and his house tax or the trials of a Mr Ukatu wereemploying many of the rules of verbal discourse and speech-act theory with which weare already familiar from a sampling of philosophical writings. Such tacit rules ofhuman verbal behavior such as 'Speak colloquially, unless there is reason not to', 'Orconvey the amount of information requested in the briefest way' were, in fact, beingemployed by the respondents.7 Not accustomed—as they admit—to reasoninghypothetically (the Uzbekistanis remark 'We always speak of only what we see'), theytried to convey a response to what they took to be a question about an existing personwith whom, unfortunately, they were not acquainted. In this sense, the tribespeoplereasoned in a way that mirrors very precisely our everyday mode of reasoning on mosttopics.8

Thus the upshot of converging the data on illiterate tribespeople with other empiricalstudies on the modes of thinking employed by people in Western societies in mundanecontexts is the realization that context is crucial to most attempts at reasoning and thatdivorce from context, although possible for the well-trained, is not nearly as easily andreadily achieved as we would like to think. Work on story grammars by sociolinguists hasindicated that our memory tries to fill in the blanks in the most convenient way possiblewhen text-processing and that, when pressed, connections are made (even, perhaps,when they are not there) to try to give the text or 'story' coherence and to make thenarration intelligible.9 In general, memory proceeds in this way for all sorts of tasks,and research on this crucial component of cognition must be taken into account whenwe theorize naturalistically about knowledge and knowledge acquisition. Thus attentionto the importance of context and the ubiquitousness of speech-act phenomena cross-culturally reminds us of ways in which knowledge is actually acquired. It is thisdifference—the difference between what we know about knowledge acquisition andwhat we construct normatively as the ideal account of knowledge or of knowledgeacquisition—which is crucial to epistemology.

II

A second area of inquiry in pragmatics focuses on the extent to which justification (bothepistemic and otherwise) is itself a speech-act, and a process which can be modeled anddeveloped by speech-act theory. Although one might be inclined to think that thismaterial has already been well mined, Asa Kasher recently argued that much of what we

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might be tempted to say about justification and speech act theory has not yet beenadequately said. Specifically, Kasher noted that

. . . [it has been] suggested] that a variety exists of methods that speakers know how to use whenrequired to show why they do hold what they have asserted. Some of these methods arc shared by allspeakers, under normal contexts of utterance, but some are used only by some of the speakers, underspecial circumstances, e.g., when certain speakers participate in deliberations of a legal or a scientificnature. Notice to what extent these two methods of deliberation are different from each other: whereaswhat has been asserted, within some branch of a science, can be justified by being shown to be the bestexplanation of some data, much more than that will be required in order to justify the very sameassertion in many courts of justice.10

The point that Kasher makes is a valuable one and, when fully developed, leads intomany other interesting areas of theory. Kasher is simply noting that what we require forthe justification of assertions varies from assertion to assertion, and from context tocontext. What is required for the justification of an assertion in the sciences is generallymuch more than what would be required for the justification of a flat assertion such as'There's a car over there', but, interestingly enough, according to Kasher, less thanwhat might be required for certain assertions in legal contexts.

Now we might label the foregoing the 'social element' in epistemology, and somehave argued that one ought to take this element into account in any well-developedepistemics." But perhaps more intriguingly, from the standpoint of the line ofargument which I am about to develop here, many have held the counter to thisposition: that is, many have held that social elements—whatever they may be—do notneed to be taken into account in epistemology, and that to do so is indeedinappropriate, since the tasks of epistemology are largely if not entirely normative.12

We need not delve extensively into the normative tradition of epistemology here,since it is clear that the tradition does in fact demand an account of knowledge in whichwe keep a justified claim safe from counter-examples, and which would leave us withairtight standards for epistemic justification. But we know from evidence such as wasalluded to in the previous section that humans tend to reason about that with whichthey are familiar on a day-to-day basis, unless they have received training or educationwhich leads them to develop the capacity to reason about the postulated. And we knowfrom experiments on memory capacity—both short-term and long-term—that thereare constraints on the memory load with which humans can readily work, as well ascountless other physiological and neurological constraints on cognitive functioning.Finally, we know, as Kasher points out, that utterances of justification are governed byspeech-act rules, and that once these higher order rules are added to the sorts offeatures mentioned above, the production of a justificatory set13 by a justifier is nosmall matter. Hence one might well wonder if any of the normatively tight theories ofthe past 20 to 30 years could actually be instantiated in an epistemic agent.

Ill

In the previous sections I have alluded to work in pragmatics—first work insociolinguistics on syllogistic reasoning, then work by a philosopher on the speech-actsrelevant to notions of justification—and I have also asserted that this work might beutilized by the naturalizing epistemologist.

Although I have cited the naturalization of epistemology as an ongoing project in the

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earlier portions of this paper, I want now to mention some strands of it with the goal ofbeing specific about where the material from pragmatics might fit in. For if it is truethat epistemology is being naturalized apace in some circles, it is also true that much ofwhat has been done up to now has relied heavily on cognitive science, specificallycognitive psychology, for its development. In terms of the large picture, AlvinGoldman, for example, has developed14 work on the notion of justification from thestandpoint of addressing the sorts of cognitive rules (rules having to do with what weknow about memory or perception from out work in cognition) which might underlie anormatively tight account of justification. Such an account, if fully presented, would bealong the lines of the traditional accounts offered in epistemology up to now, in that theaccount would try to keep knowledge claims safe from refutation and counter-exampling, while still ameliorating our notion of justification with some material whichis at least partially descriptive.

Hilary Kornblith has developed some notions with regard to the social component ofjustification in some of his more recent journal work,15 but this tack, again, has a greatdeal to do with research in developmental psychology, and work on the knowledge-acquisition processes of children in particular.16

Psychology has a good deal to tell us which would aid in the development ofnaturalistic moves in epistemology, and a theorist who would like to see epistemologydevelop along lines more consonant with recent work in cognition can only be glad tosee such work being done.17 Cognitive psychology in general, however, will be providingus with a 'bottom-up' view of the functioning of epistemic agents and, althoughresearch may proceed along such intriguing lines as connectionism and neuralnetworks, there are other, non-neural levels which remain open to description. Ingeneral, the tendency has been to avoid allusion to these levels, possibly because itmight be thought to be theoretically important to develop more basic lines first. Butwhatever theoretical foundation is supplied for intentionality, it remains true thatepistemic justification is a process with important sociolinguistic components, many ofwhich have already received elucidation in the literature. It is not only the case that theobvious sorts of examples—justifying a claim to a friend, for instance—fall along theselines, but even more recondite instances of epistemic justification can be modeled insome sense from a sociolinguistic base. Epistemic justification can and does occur in thecase where one challenges—and justifies to—oneself. Although the thought patterns ofsuch a challenge are frequently so swift as to be inarticulate, so to speak, this need notbe so, and in almost all cases they can be recaptured. Even the last moments beforesomething as rapid and traumatic as an accident can be recapitulated in a verbalizedmodel of the immediate, non-verbalized sensation that 'Something's wrong—what isit?'

The point is, then, that the work on naturalized epistemology up to now has onlyproceeded from one sort of line of research. Epistemology, if it is to utilize naturalizedmaterial at all, can and should utilize the lines provided by sociolinguistics andspeech-act theory.

IV

If one thinks in terms of the two classic threads of epistemic justificationtheory—foundationalism and coherentism—one can see that one theory is alreadysomewhat more naturalistic than the other. This rather surprising claim, if viewed

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naively, is supported by a glance at what the structure or framework of epistemicjustification might turn out to be in the case of either theory. In the case offoundationalism, the literature has tended to describe 'chains', or even 'pyramids'. Inother words, a diagram of a foundationalist attempt at epistemic justification wouldshow one claim supporting another claim, the more fundamental of the two claimsusually (although not always) appealing to some facet of experience which is alleged tobe less corrigible—in the case of empirical claims it is generally some facet of privilegedaccess experience—so that there is a chain, or framework of such claims, all supportedby a claim which has special status. The foundationalists sometimes label this status'incorrigibility'; that has, however, been out of fashion for some time, and in morerecent theories it is a somewhat weaker status, such as 'self-justifying', 'self-presenting'or 'self-warranting'. One might be inclined to think that it is highly implausible tobelieve that the process of epistemic justification ever actually does proceed in such aneat diagram, and so one might be skeptical of the extent to which foundationalisttheories could ever be something other than irretrievably normative (this is howepistemic justification ought to proceed).

If one turned, then, to coherentism, one would see that the diagramming of acoherentist attempt at justification would be somewhat different. I am not hereconcerned with the problems which classical versions of these theories pose: theliterature tends to be concerned with inconsistencies in coherentist justificatory sets, orwith regresses in certain forms of foundationalism.18 What I am concerned with is what,schematically, a foundationalist or coherentist attempt at justification looks like, and mypoint is that a coherentist presents us with a completely different sort of diagram. Thecoherentist attempt will utilize some sort of circular or semicircular apparatus—sincethe term 'circle' is one which most philosophers do not care to employ, terms such as'web' or 'network' receive frequent play. One claim will be justified by another claim,which in turn will be justified by still another, and at some point any one of the claimscould turn for its partial justification back to one of the claims originally cited, for it isthe manner in which the claims fit together, so to speak, which is important to thecoherentist.

Now the foregoing supports my preliminary point. Although neither of theseprimitive sketches will do anything theoretically for the cognitive psychologist or theneurologist, the schematic employed by the coherentist is just a bit closer to a map ofcognitive operations than that employed by the foundationalist, for it is a network ofcognitive operations with which we are ultimately concerned. Thus, if one were toproceed naturalistically, one might find it easier to think in terms of naturalizing acoherence theory than a foundationalist theory, and one might first of all want to thinkin terms of naturalizing a justificatory set.

The justificatory set is, of course, simply that set of claims, turning back upon itself,which constitutes the set of beliefs with which we operate on a daily basis. And, howeverelegant it might be from the standpoint of theory to think of that set as a weightedaveraging of neuronal material,19 one can also think of the set as simply the claims orbeliefs which constitute the backdrop of our everyday mode of functioning.

Now in the previous section I mentioned that those who have been at work in thenaturalization of epistemology thus far have tended to use the results of cognitivepsychology and the cognitive neurosciences for their advances in epistemic theory.20

But one could ignore that sort of work and still achieve some interesting moves innaturalization, for not everything which can be described by work in the social ornatural sciences is at the neurological level. Thus the material from sociolinguistics

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which was developed at the beginning of the paper represents a fruitful source fornaturalization at the macro- or non-neural level.

How does the process of epistemic justification proceed? From the macro level, itproceeds as part of a response pattern (usually verbal, but not necessarily so) torecognized challenges on the part of agents acting in a skeptical or doubting role. Thechallenges must be recognized by the original claimant as challenges: I am notproceeding along the lines of epistemic justification if I fail to understand that myroommate was intending to challenge my knowledge of the first-order predicate logicwhen she said 'Why did you do that?' If intead I took her to be asking about the color ofink I employed, I have missed the first step in the complicated speech-act sequencewhich constitutes—whether employed by oneself alone, employed verbally with aninterlocutor, or employed non-verbally by signals and signs—the core of the process ofepistemic justification. In addition, once the challenges are recognized, it is a furtherstep in the process that the output the agent making the claim delivers must be intendedto answer the person acting as skeptic. These two moves—(a) that one intends toproduce a state of doubt, and it is recognized as such; and (b) that one intends to quellthe other's doubting state—are at the heart of the process of epistemic justification,and an epistemology naturalized would recognize this point. Although I might beinterested, theoretically, in the various brain-states or computational maneuversneeded to run through (a) and (b), I might also be interested in a gloss of (a) and (b) at ahigher level—the speech-act/sociolinguistic level. It is precisely here that the workpresented in the earlier part of this paper is relevant. For if I know certain facts aboutour tendency to reason in terms of the less hypothetical and more concrete, as Scribnersuggests, or to provide justificatory response along different lines depending on thetype and style of justification required, as Kasher suggests, I might be in a betterposition to naturalize this portion of epistemic justification theory.

In the previous section I have argued that there is more than one way to think of thenaturalization of epistemic theory, and that part of what might be meant by thenaturalization of one strand, justification theory in particular, is further attention tomaterial we now possess which is descriptive of the macro level of functioning foragents engaged in the process of epistemic justification. Enough work has been done onthe naturalization of epistemology so that further defenses appear unnecessary, butmuch of the literature in epistemology is still straightforwardly normative and fails totake into account any information about cognitive processes or brain functioning.

That this is the case should come as no surprise if one recalls the history ofepistemology. Platonic theory aside, the origins of contemporary epistemology certainlygo as far back as Descartes, and the globality of Descartes' problems—Evil Demonsbeing competent to affect all possible situations subject to knowledge claims—lent itselfto a certain sort of theorizing. The desire to render a knowledge claim safe frompossible refutation stems at least in part from this sort of Cartesian concern. Anotherwellspring for the project of rendering knowledge claims incorrigible or irrefutable isthe desire to place empirical knowledge on a footing analogous to the certainty ofdeductive knowledge. But neither of these projects (Cartesian on the one side, Humeanon the other) has anything other than historicity to recommend it. What we now knowabout cognitive functioning renders much of the previous theory construction of

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epistemology out of date and irrelevant. One can, if one is so inclined, continue withthe desire to make a knowledge claim defeasible. If one is so inclined, one is continuingin the tradition which is now several hundred years old.

But the chief difficulty with such attempts at normative theorizing is that they turnout, almost to a theory, to be non-instantiable. Limitations on memory andcomputational speed mean that certain sorts of coherence theories almost certainlycould not be instantiated in living epistemic agents.21 There is absolutely nothing whichwe know about brain functioning which would allow us to believe that thinkers proceedin a foundationalist manner, or (more importantly) that the more rigidly formulatedfoundationalist theories could ever be employed by human agents since, again, thecombination of the complexity of the epistemic chain or pyramid and the amount ofmemory utilized to formulate the chain and justify the claims is staggering.

The argument for the naturalization of at least some of contemporary epistemictheory is a powerful one. What has not been specifically argued for to date is the utilityof sociolinguistic and speech-act theory to model the macro level phenomenaassociated with the process of epistemic justification. If epistemic justification theorycan be naturalized, we need to employ all the means of naturalization at our disposal.

VI

In the preceding sections three major lines of argument have been constructed tosupport the notion that epistemic justification theory can be naturalized, and that partof such naturalization is the modeling of the larger aspects of the process by pragmaticsand sociolinguistic theory. The first line of argument adduced material from the workof Scribner and others on the relationships between such formalized modes ofreasoning as syllogistic thinking and level of education. While it was noted thatsyllogistic reasoning about hypothetical subject matter seems to be (cross-culturally)beyond the capacity of those who have little or no formal education, the prevalence andfrequency of reasoning patterns along contextualized modes seems striking and servesto remind us that, unless otherwise trained, we tend to reason about that with which weare already familiar from the context of everyday living. The second line of argumentborrowed from Kasher's work on modes of justification for differing epistemicsituations, and pointed us in the direction of being able to assert that what passes forjustification in various contexts is determined by the speech-act rules applicable to thatcontext, and that these rules can be formulated. A third line of argument asked us tothink of epistemic justification as a process which is itself replicable along the lines ofconversational inquiry (even when one is justifying to oneself) and reminded us that, ifthis is the case, intent and recognition of intent are crucial in the formulation of theprocess, and that both Scribner's work and Kasher's work would help us to recognizethe contextual limitations on justificatory constraints.

In a final, broader line of argument, I recapitulated the influence of the normativehistorical tradition on contemporary epistemology, but made the plea thatepistemology should utilize the now available cognitive science to create theories whichare instantiable in human epistemic agents. The argument against the naturalization ofepistemology is made by those who believe—quite rightly—that completely naturalizedmaterial cannot answer the traditional questions associated with post-Cartesianthought. But a larger question for epistemology—and the rest of analyticphilosophy—revolves around the extent to which philosophy should remain fascinated

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with images thrown up by the mirror of nature. Perhaps data from nature herself wouldbe more appropriate.

Notes

1. I will cite the books only. The two most recent are: GOLDMAN, A., Epistemology and Cognition, HarvardUniversity Press, Cambridge, MA (1986). KORNBLITH, H., Naturalizing Epistemology, Bradford of MITPress, Cambridge, MA (1985).

2. Again, for the sake of brevity, I cite only three works. The works most frequently cited in this context are:Fox KELLER, E., Reflections on Gender and Science, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT (1983). HARDING,S., The Science Question in Feminism, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY (1986). BORDO, S., The Flight toObjectivity, SUNY Press, Albany, NY (1987).

3. One superb series is: FREEDLE, R. O. (Ed.), Advances in Discourse Processes, Ablex, Norwood, NJ(1970s-80s). The series currently runs to some twenty odd volumes. An excellent compendium is thevolume: BLOOM, L. (Ed.), Readings in Language Development, Wiley, New York (1978).

4. In this section I will be referring extensively to essays found in: FREEDLE, R. O. (Ed.), New Directions inDiscourse Processing, Vol. II, Ablex, Norwood, NJ (1979). This volume, as I indicated above, is but one of alengthy series on these complex and intriguing topics.

5. SCRIBNER, S., 'Modes of thinking and ways of speaking: culture and logic reconsidered', in FREEDLE, R. O.(Ed.), (1979), pp. 223, 226, 232 (see note 4).

6. SCRIBNER (1979), p. 231 (see note 5).7. Such rules were originally formulated in the work of H.P. Grice. See for example: GRICE, H. P., 'Utterer's

meaning and intent', Philosophical Review (1967).8. Scribner found that the results seemed to hold cross-culturally as long as level of formal education

remained constant. In other words, similar results, only slightly less pronounced, seemed to hold forrespondents in the USA and Western European countries.

9. A helpful piece on this is also in the Scribner anthology. See WARREN, W. H., NICHOLAS, F). W. andTRABASSO, T., 'Event chains and inferences in understanding narratives', in SCRIBNER (1979), pp. 23-32,esp. p. 23 (see note 5).

10. KASHER, A., 'Justification of speech, acts and speech acts', in LE PORE, E. (Ed.), New Directions in Semantics,Academic Press, New York, p. 295 (1987).

11. ANNIS, D., 'A contextualist theory of epistemic justification', American Philosophical Quarterly, July (1978).12. The work of Alvin Goldman may be thought of as a large-scale response to this charge. See: GOLDMAN, A.,

Epistemology and Cognition, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA (1986).13. The term is borrowed from the coherentists; see: CORNMAN, J., in 'Foundational vs. nonfoundational

theories of empirical justification', PAPPAS, G. S. and SWAIN, M. (Eds), Essays on Knowledge and Justification,PAPPAS, S. and SWAIN, M. (Eds), Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY (1978).

14. In addition to the work cited above, a valuable piece is: GOLDMAN, A., 'The internalist conception ofjustification', in Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. V, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, MN(1980).

15. KORNBLITH, H., 'Some social features of cognition', Synthese, 73 (1987), pp. 27-41.16. KORNBLITH (1987), p. 28 (see note 15).17. See for example: DURAN, J., 'Reductionism and the Naturalization of Epistemology', Dialectica, 42 (1989),

pp. 295-306.18. This is a concern of Laurence Bonjour's. See: BONJOUR, L., The Structure of Empirical Knowledge, Harvard

University Press, Cambridge, MA (1985).19. This is part and parcel of the connectionist view.20. See note 17.21. See CORNMAN (1978) (note 13). Indeed, it would seem that a computer is the best sort of device if one were

to attempt to instantiate versions of classical coherentism.Dow

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