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Epistemic Contextualism and the Sociality of Knowledge

2025· book-chapter· en· W4409661463 on OpenAlexaff
Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa

Bibliographic record

VenueOxford University Press eBooks · 2025
Typebook-chapter
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicEpistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics
Canadian institutionsUniversity of British Columbia
Fundersnot available
KeywordsContextualismSocialityEpistemologyPsychologyPhilosophyLinguisticsEcologyBiology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract This chapter has four central aims. Section 1 distinguishes two ideas within epistemology that sometimes travel under the name “contextualism”—the “situational contextualist” idea that an individual’s context, especially their social context, can make for a difference in what they know, and the “linguistic contextualist” idea that discourse using the word “knows” and its cognates is context-sensitive, expressing different contents in different conversational contexts. Second, section 2 situates contextualism with respect to several influential ideas in feminist epistemology. These ideas are thoroughgoingly contextualist in the situational sense; this section explores the prospects for linguistic contextualist analogues or implementations of them. Simple connections between these feminist ideas and linguistic contextualism will prove elusive, but more subtle ones are possible, and sometimes attractive. Section 3 considers the degree to which contextual epistemic parameters are determined interpersonally, as opposed to individualistically. Should contextualists hold that speakers can individually determine the contextual parameters that influence the truth-conditions of their utterances? Or are they fixed at a broader social level? This section rehearses some influential reasons to opt for the latter, more social, form of contextualism. Section 4 discusses the practical and moral significance of speakers’ choices of epistemic parameters, given contextualism. For example, it considers how standards-raising can be used to discredit evidential sources, with an eye toward the social and moral consequences of such moves.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.012
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.013
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Other · Consensus signal: Other
Teacher disagreement score0.012
Threshold uncertainty score0.064

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0120.013
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.001
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0030.002
Science and technology studies0.0060.069
Scholarly communication0.0120.015
Open science0.0010.010
Research integrity0.0030.004
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0050.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.057
GPT teacher head0.235
Teacher spread0.178 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreOther

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

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Citations0
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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Same venueOxford University Press eBooksSame topicEpistemology, Ethics, and MetaphysicsFrench-language works237,207