This book seeks to further the debate between 'cognitivists' and 'non-cognitivists' about the possibility and the nature of moral knowledge. The book is divided.
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- 2007.09.13
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- Alan Thomas, Value and Context: The Nature of Moral and Political Knowledge - PhilPapers
Two Different Approaches to Contextual Ethics. Susan Sherwin - - Hypatia 4 2: The Nature of Moral and Political Knowledge. Intuition as a Basic Source of Moral Knowledge. Evans - - Philosophia 35 2: Political Realism and Political Idealism: The Difference That Evil Makes. Roman Altshuler - - Public Reason 1 2: Between Enlightenment and Disaster: Dimensions of the Political Use of Knowledge. Alan Thomas, Value and Context: Added to PP index Total downloads 23 , of 2,, Recent downloads 6 months 1 , of 2,, How can I increase my downloads?
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History of Western Philosophy. Science Logic and Mathematics. In the final chapter Thomas argues that political liberalism can allow a central role for civil society and active citizenship indeed, Thomas suggests this will be needed by political liberals to provide a motivation for restraint in deliberations with others about constitutional and legislative fundamentals.
Thomas treats the resulting view as a form of liberal republicanism.
2007.09.13
Thomas argues against Charles Taylor that there is no need to presuppose active citizenship as a part of a substantive conception of the good life; rather, it is treated as an optional value -- citizenship participation is not a component of a good life as such, but ensures security, and the functioning of society to allow for the pursuit of individual purposes.
He grants that over time such a political liberalism will affect the background culture in which it is embedded, but argues that this is not contrary to a Rawlsian liberalism as such. The breadth of the book is striking. Thomas engages with a remarkable range of issues -- including to scratch only the surface Harman and Mackie's well-known arguments against the possibility of realist moral knowledge, the implications of truth minimalism, the nature of response-dependent concepts, the interpretation of Williams' internal reasons requirement, the nature of ideological beliefs, the rejection of epistemic realism following Michael Williams , the understanding of the methodology of reflective equilibrium as contextualist, rather than coherentist , Rawls' shift to contexualism, and the place of civil society and citizenship in the most plausible forms of liberalism.
A weakness in Thomas' work comes in his discussions and applications of epistemic contextualism.
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He says very little to show why we should embrace contextualism; he briefly argues that it provides the most plausible available response to the sceptic and that as such it ought to be taken as our best theory of epistemic justification, while rejecting coherentism and foundationalism in the space of about twenty pages. Of course one can produce arguments that change the course of a field in a matter of pages Gettier comes to mind … , but this is not what happens here. Extensive articles and books have been written on these topics while Thomas more or less presents a few arguments drawn from Michael Williams.
To be fair, one cannot discuss every possible tangent or objection to one's views, and Thomas explicitly states that it is beyond the scope of his book to defend contextualism thoroughly, and that he intends simply to make use of it with respect to moral and political knowledge. But when so much of the latter part of the book is intended to highlight the benefits of epistemic contextualism for the moral cognitivist and given the book's subtitle: The Nature of Moral and Political Knowledge , a more substantial defence of the position would seem in order.
Thomas does not engage with critics of epistemic contextualism in any significant fashion -- there is no mention of the critical responses to contextualism of Richard Feldman, Ernest Sosa, or Jonathan Vogel among many others.
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Thomas focuses on a rather particular understanding of contextualism -- broadly that of Michael Williams as in Williams' Unnatural Doubts. Thomas treats contextualism as a rival to coherentism and foundationalism, though many epistemologists would not treat contextualism as such in this way. After all, even within a given context, we need to determine what constitutes justification, and contextualism itself as a semantic theory does not dictate an answer.
One could thus be an evidentialist, foundationalist, relevant alternatives theorist, or what-have-you, when it comes to the justification of beliefs within a context. Thomas further seems to see contextualism as ruling out the need to address most sceptical questions concerning moral knowledge arising from outside of the context of a given cultural tradition. But again this approach is not representative of most epistemic contextualists, who would hold that what level of justification an agent must achieve in order to be attributed knowledge and what background considerations can be taken for granted can vary from conversation to conversation even within a tradition; a context is treated as much more local by such epistemologists.
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Even if Thomas is treating particular moral traditions as forms of discipline of inquiry as in Williams' contextualism , we can engage in a reflective assessment of these disciplines and their supposed methodological necessities as such. And while many epistemologists with contextualist sympathies would agree that the fact that a person does not know a proposition in a 'philosophical' context fails to show that this person therefore does not know tout court , they would not take contextualism to show these philosophical contexts and questions arising within them to be therefore illegitimate.
Again, Thomas seems to broadly follow Michael Williams' approach here with little consideration of objections to it. Those sceptical of Williams' work will be so of Thomas'. In the end, it is not clear how much work Thomas' contextualism is actually doing.
Thomas tries to show that contextualism would allow us to have knowledge of a plurality of values and goods even in modern societies. But he gives little attention to how foundationalists and coherentists could embrace similar claims and allow for the possibility of local moral knowledge, drawing on thick moral concepts.
In particular, moderate versions of foundationalism and coherentism would seem to have ample resources to accommodate the sensibilist cognitivism proposed by Thomas -- even in modern societies which are aware of, and may contain, a plurality of moral traditions. He does, at times, seem to hold only that contextualism is best able to vindicate moral knowledge -- but here again, the arguments are rather quick, and little consideration is given to alternatives, or to possible objections to his contextualism.
Alan Thomas, Value and Context: The Nature of Moral and Political Knowledge - PhilPapers
For all this, there are several very interesting, insightful discussions in the book. Thomas is very careful in distinguishing the views of McDowell and Wiggins-- views that are often too quickly treated as a single 'sensibilist' theory. His discussion of internal reasons and impartiality in chapter four is quite thorough, and provides a highly plausible interpretation of Bernard Williams.