Gettier and Contextualism
Masaharu Mizumoto
Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology
Last year I presented the following argument to the effect that (as Travis 1996
claims, and against Whiting 2011) contextualism and deflationism

areincompatible.
1) If contextualism is true and if the context of T-schema, either disquotational (DS) orpropositional (PS), is not required to be fixed between the left and the right side handside, then any instances of T-schema would be trivially falsified by contextualist cases.
2) If contextualism is true and if the context of T-schema (either DS or PS) is required
to be fixed between the left and the right side hand side, then T-schema would rule out
the possibility of accidental truth (as analyzed as cross-contextual truth).
3) There are accidental truths.
4) Therefore, in either case, if contextualism is true, any instance of T-schema is false.
5) The validity of T-schema is a necessary, if not sufficient, condition of deflationism.
6) Therefore, contextualism and deflationism are incompatible.

However, the paradigmatic examples of accidental truth assumed in this argument(in particular, in premise 3 were Gettier cases. Thus the assumption there was thatthe belief or the corresponding statement of the subject in the Gettier case(hereafter Gettier belief or Gettier statement) was true.
While this assumption is widely accepted by epistemologists (even those
who claim that the Gettier belief is knowledge), it seems arguable (or even moreconsistent to claim) at least for thoroughgoing contextualists, that (as a response topremise 3) the Gettier statements are actually false because of the context inwhich the subjects of the Gettier belief are situated (note that, this is not a specificversion of contextualism à la DeRose, or epistemic contextualism). Moreover,deflationists may accept premise 2 and ask, “What’s wrong with ruling out
accidental truths?” Perhaps, they may claim, accidental truths are not genuine
truths (or if you please, true truths), but merely derivative truths, and therefore

any serious theory of truth may ignore such truths. However, it still follows fromthis view that the Gettier beliefs and statements as not instances of genuine truth.

Thus both contextualists and deflationaists have reason or at least motivation todeny that the Gettier statements are (genuinely) true. Let us call thisno-accidental truth response, or NAT.

On the other hand, there can be another extreme response from theopposite direction. One may instead claim that the relevant utterances in thefamiliar contextualist cases are all accidentally true, rather than false (as claimed
by contextualists). If this response is true, then it would falsify our premise 1.
Again, not only deflationists, but also contextualists may agree with this claim, if
the contextualist dissociates the notion of truth and the context-relative content,
as we have argued we should. Let us call all truth response, or AT.

In this paper we shall explore these extreme options, and argue that boththe proponents of NAT and AT fail to do justice to our notion of disagreement.

Agreement/disagreement is a primitive distinction in our communication anddebate, in which our practice of the truth/falsity attribution is embedded. Thus in
the case of genuine disagreement, we have disagreement over the truth value ofthe relevant statement. If there is no disagreement, on the other hand, a fortiori
there should not be disagreement over the truth value.

However, the proponent of NAT must claim that there is a disagreement inGettier cases, between the relevant statement or belief of the subject and that ofthe person who possesses relevant knowledge in that situation, which is highly
counterintuitive. For example, the subject in the Gettier situation says, “Smith hasa Ford”, and the person who knows that Smith has a Ford would agree. Thereseems no relevant disagreement here, even though there is no genuine agreement

either (due to the contextual gap). In this sense, accidental truths lie between
genuine agreement and genuine disagreement.
Also, the proponent of AT must claim that there is no disagreement in therelevant contextualist cases. That is true in such cases, where apparent
disagreement due to the contextual gap should be dissolved when the context isclarified. For example, A claims that there is no milk in the fridge, in the sense thatit can be used for coffee, whereas B claims that there is milk in the fridge, in thesense that it must be cleaned up. However, for any such contextualist case, there
should be also the corresponding genuine disagreement case. Thus suppose thatboth A and B are true here. But another person, C, who claims that there is milk in
the fridge in the sense of A, must be disagreeing with A, and therefore what C says

should be judged false if what A says is true. We cannot say what C says is also

true, if accidentally, otherwise we would effectively eliminate genuinedisagreement in such cases.

Thus as long as there is a gap between genuine agreement and genuine
disagreement, NAT is not tenable, and as long as there is genuine disagreement,
AT is not tenable. Consequently, as long as we respect the intuition about theordinary facts about agreement and disagreement, contextualism and deflationism
are not compatible.