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Everyone Knew He Did It, But He Was Not Condemned! Knowledge And Knowledge Attributions In Legal Contexts, Danny Marrero Avendano

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Theorizing about knowledge attributions has revolved almost exclusively around the problem of skepticism and knowledge attributions in everyday conversations. Sutton (2007), however, points out that Epistemic Contextualism seems to settle another field: "[i]t is sometimes suggested that courtroom proceedings provide a context that shows the context-sensitivity of knowledge ascription truth-conditions" (p. 87). This dissertation is devoted to the evaluation of this contextualist suggestion (CS). Epistemic Contextualism claims that the correctness of knowledge attributions depends on the salience of error possibilities or the practical states of a knowledge attributor's context of utterance. I interpret CS implies that the context of utterance …