The collective knowledge doctrine goes further still and allows attribution of knowledge aggregated across different employees.
On Heller's view (1995), just how reliable a belief-forming process must be for an attribution of knowledge to the subject to be correct depends upon context, in the attributor sense introduced above.
Justification, of course, comes in degrees; and what counts as justification simpliciter i.e., justification to the level required for an attribution of knowledge to express a truth is governed by a 'rule of salience' (1998, 292, n. 11), whereby one's evidence/reasons must be good enough to preclude salient possibilities of error.
The study, Precise Offers Are Potent Anchors: Conciliatory Counteroffers and Attributions of Knowledge in Negotiations was authored by Malia Mason, the Gantcher Associate Professor of Business; doctoral students Alice Lee and Elizabeth Wiley and Daniell Ames, professor.
Instead, the main insights to be drawn from a study of the skeptic's argument involve the context-sensitivity of attributions of knowledge, and the role that the Rule of Sensitivity plays in changing the epistemic standards that govern these attributions.
We report an experiment on lay attributions of knowledge and justification for a wide range of Gettier Cases and for a related class of controversial cases known as Skeptical Pressure cases, which are also thought by philosophers to elicit intuitive denials of knowledge.
Some of the topics covered are attributions of knowledge, the correspondence theory of truth, objectivity and subjectivity, possible worlds, primary and secondary evidence, scepticism, transcendentalism and relativism.
Epistemic contextualists explain the assertional data as due to attributions of knowledge of the form "S knows that p" varying according to context.
For instance: "[O]ur new solution [to SA] is designed largely with the goal in mind of crediting most of our attributions of knowledge with truth.
Because, as both Bach (2005) and Brown (2006) note, self-attributions of knowledge may not be the best cases on which to focus (see too DeRose 2005, 181-183), we shall here consider Cohen's third-personal airport example.
Reliance on such cognitive metaphors is widespread in the biological sciences, ranging from our attributions of knowledge and recognition to cells in the immune system, through to the attribution of goals and desires to Mother Nature in describing how natural selection operates (cf. Godfrey-Smith 2009: 9 11, 36 39).
