Keith DeRose’s new book The Appearance of Ignorance (TAI) is a welcome companion volume to his 2009 book The Case for Contextualism (TCC). Where TCC focused on contextualism as a view in the philosophy of language, TAI focuses on how contextualism contributes to our understanding of (and solution to) some perennial epistemological problems, with the skeptical problem being the main focus of six of the seven chapters. DeRose’s view is that a solution to the skeptical problem must do two things. First, it must explain how it is that we can know lots of things, such as that we have hands. Second, it must explain how it can seem that we don’t know these things. In slogan form, DeRose’s argument is that a contextualist semantics for knowledge attributions is needed to account for the “appearance of ignorance”—the appearance that we don’t know that skeptical hypotheses fail to obtain. In my critical discussion I will argue inter alia that we don’t need a contextualist semantics to account for the appearance of ignorance, and in any case that the “strength” of the appearance of ignorance is unclear, as is the need for a philosophical diagnosis of it.

中文翻译：

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无知的消失

Keith DeRose 的新书 The Appearance of Ignorance (TAI) 是他 2009 年出版的书 The Case for Contextualism (TCC) 的受欢迎的配套书。TCC 专注于语境主义作为语言哲学中的一种观点，而 TAI 则专注于语境主义如何有助于我们理解（和解决）一些长期存在的认识论问题，怀疑问题是七章中六章的主要焦点。DeRose 的观点是，怀疑问题的解决方案必须做两件事。首先，它必须解释为什么我们可以知道很多东西，比如我们有手。其次，它必须解释为什么我们不知道这些事情。以口号的形式，DeRose 的论点是，需要知识归因的语境主义语义来解释“无知的外观”——我们不知道怀疑假设无法获得的外观。在我的批判性讨论中，我将特别争辩说，我们不需要上下文语义学来解释无知的出现，并且无论如何，无知的“强度”是不清楚的，因为需要哲学对其进行诊断。