Maria
Aloni
Berit
Brogaard
Paul Egré
Pascal Engel
Christopher
Hookway
Ian
Rumfitt
Jonathan
Schaffer
Claudine
Tiercelin
Investigating
the connexions between knowledge and questions is relevant to
epistemology and
the philosophy of language in several respects.
Epistemology,
particularly in the post-Gettier era, has put considerable emphasis on
the
“standard” analysis of knowledge as justified true belief,
the first
formulation of which is more often than not credited to Plato's Meno. However, just think about the way
Socrates, in the same Meno, makes his
interlocutor “give birth” to a geometrical truth of which
he seemed totally
ignorant before, by asking him a series of questions that he answers
correctly.
This suggests an “alternative” view of knowledge as an
ability to answer
questions correctly, which has been endorsed by authors closer to us,
like
Powers, Castañeda, White, Craig, and others as well. As the move
from the
“standard” to the “alternative” view had better
be motivated, it is important
to examine the relative merits and limits of the latter against issues
that are
traditional to “justification-based” epistemology, such as
that of responding
to the sceptical challenge.
Also, there
seems to be quite “natural” connexions between knowledge
and questions, which
show in the important role the latter play in knowledge acquisition.
For
instance, knowledge acquisition through other people’s testimony
may involve
asking them questions and it may be held up by asking the wrong
questions/being
given the wrong answers or asking the questions/being given the answers
in a
wrong way. One may reasonably expect that reflecting on the
relationships
between knowledge and questions can lead to a better understanding of
how
testimony works as a source of knowledge, and more generally, to a
better
picture of the role played by questions in knowledge acquisition,
perhaps in
the spirit of the interrogative model of inquiry presented by Jaakko Hintikka in several places.
Moreover,
in the line of Dewey who considered inquiry and questioning as being
almost
synonymous, Christopher Hookway has argued that if epistemic norms are
to guide
one’s inquiries, then a crucial issue for all candidate analyses
of epistemic
evaluation is what makes something count as a correct answer to a
question – an
issue, by the way, that has interested epistemologists as well as
philosophers
of language and linguists at least since Hamblin’s work
inaugurated decades of
confrontation or suchlike between “semanticist” and “pragmaticist”
approaches to questions and the meaning of interrogatives.
Questions
raise another interesting issue at the interface of epistemology and
the
philosophy of language, namely that of their role in ascriptions of
knowledge. It is clear that epistemology
has always been more concerned with knowledge-that and
“knowledge-that”
ascriptions than with knowledge-wh
and “knowledge-wh” ascriptions. These
are constructions in which “know” takes an indirect
constituent question as a
complement (“know who/what/where/how/why/…”). On the one hand, authors like
Hintikka, Lewis, Boër & Lycan, and more recently Stanley &
Williamson,
have argued that the meaning of some (or all) of these constructions
can be
accounted for reductively in terms of the meaning of “knowledge-that” ascriptions; while on the other
hand, authors like Jonathan Schaffer have insisted that in any
construction in
which it may occur, “know” includes an irreducible
reference to a question, and
that to know is always to know something as an answer to a question.
Both views
attest to the importance of paying attention to the role of questions
in the
semantics, as well as the pragmatics of knowledge ascriptions.
The
relationships between knowledge and questions being philosophically
important
in all these respects and many others, the LPHS–Archives H.
Poincaré will
organise a two-day International Conference devoted to this topic at
the
Université Nancy 2 (Nancy, France) on Thursday 15th
and Friday 16th
March 2007. This will be an occasion for confirmed researchers to
present their
work and discuss each other’s work on knowledge and questions.
12.00—14.00
Registration, Coffee
14.00—14.10
Conference Welcome
14.10—15.20
Claudine
Tiercelin, “The Fixation
of Knowledge: Pragmatist Parries to the Skeptical Challenge”
15.20—16.30
Paul
Egré, “Epistemic Verbs and
Embedded Questions”
16.30—16.50
Coffee Break
16.50—18.00
Maria Aloni,
“The Pragmatics of
Questions and Attitudes”
20.00
Conference Dinner
9.30—10.40
Jonathan
Schaffer, “Knowing the
Answer”
10.40—11.00
Coffee Break
11.00—12.10
Berit
Brogaard, “What Mary Did Yesterday. Remarks on
Knowledge-wh”
12.10—14.00
Lunch
14.00—15.10
Ian Rumfitt,
“Knowledge by
Deduction”
15.10—16.20
Pascal Engel,
“Asserting, Asking
and the Norm of Knowledge”
16.20—16.50
Coffee Break
16.50—18.00 Christopher Hookway, “Questions, Problems, Inquiries”
17.50
Conference End
The
conference program is also available here in PDF.
The poster
of the conference is available here in PDF.
People
interested in attending the conference are asked to fill out the online
pre-registration
form.
The
registration fees, not including the conference dinner on Thursday
(except for
the speakers), are expected to be:
-
5
euros for students,
-
10
euros for non-students.
Registration
fees are payable on the first day of the conference (on site).
Those who
would like to attend the conference dinner on the Thursday evening are
asked to
check the appropriate box on the pre-registration
form.
All the
sessions of the conference will take place at:
Université Nancy 2
Campus Lettres et Sciences Humaines
3 place G. de Bouillon
Nancy, France
Anyone
interested in attending the conference is asked to make their own
travel
arrangements.
The train station is
ten minutes’ walk from the Université Nancy 2. As
Metz-Nancy-Lorraine airport is
The A31 motorway runs from the
Benelux countries in the north to
For more
detailed information and for maps, click here.
Click here.
For any
other queries, please contact the conference organiser Franck
Lihoreau (Franck.Lihoreau_at_univ-nancy2.fr).