Sarah Moss: A Contextualist Reframing of Encroachment
This talk defends a contextualist theory of ‘knowledge’ ascriptions. I argue that the implicit argument of ‘knows’ is sometimes bound by a quantifier, where this binding can be explained by contextualist theories but not by competing interest-relative theories of knowledge. In addition, the contextualist successfully explains distinctive patterns in our judgments about sentences in which 'knows' is embedded under change-of-state verbs. Along the way, I argue that the most common definitions of ‘encroachment’ and ‘interest relativity’ are seriously flawed. Ultimately, though, the distinction between contextualist and interest-relative theories of knowledge turns out to have fewer substantive consequences than one might have thought.
