The Appearance of Ignorance ― Knowledge, Skepticism, and Context

Contextualism, the view that the epistemic standards a subject must meet in order for a claim attributing "knowledge" to her to be true do vary with context, has been hotly debated in epistemology and philosophy of language during the last few decades. This volume presents, develops, and defends contextualist solutions to two of the stickiest problems in epistemology: the puzzles of skeptical hypotheses and of lotteries. It is argued that, at least by ordinary standards for knowledge, we do know that skeptical hypotheses are false, and that we've lost the lottery. Why it seems that we don't know that they're false tells us a lot, both about what knowledge is and how knowledge attributions work.

The Appearance of Ignorance is the companion volume to Keith DeRose's 2009 title The Case for Contextualism: Knowledge, Skepticism, and Context, Volume 1.

Keith DeRose is Allison Foundation Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. He works mainly in epistemology, philosophy of language, and philosophy of religion. He received his PhD from UCLA, and taught at New York University and Rice University before Yale. He is the author of The Case for Contextualism: Knowledge, Assertion, and Context, Volume 1 (OUP, 2009)