Salient Alternatives in Perspective

This paper empirically investigates how perspective bears on putative salient alternative effects on knowledge ascriptions. Some theoretical accounts predict salient alternative effects in both first- and third-person perspective conditions. These include semantic accounts such as contextualism [Lewis 1996; DeRose 2009] and psychological accounts such as the epistemic focal bias account [Gerken 2013, 2017]. In contrast, other psychological accounts, such as the egocentric bias account [Nagel, 2010; Alexander et al. 2014] and the deference account [Turri 2017], only have clear predictions in third-person perspective conditions. Our study provides evidence of a salient alternative effect of the same magnitude in both first and third-person conditions. Thus, the study provides empirical evidence that might help to adjudicate between competing accounts in the literature on salient alternatives.