ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews psychological work relevant to the attainment and perception of knowledge for subjects and attributors in shifting circumstances and discusses the upshot of this work for epistemic contextualism. It focuses on the factors governing search termination, and in particular, at factors affecting the relationship between subjects' confidence and their information search behavior. The chapter overviews the empirical work on mindreading, or the capacity to attribute mental states, and also focuses on the most-studied imperfection in mindreading, the bias of epistemic egocentrism. The bias of epistemic egocentrism explains some of the asymmetries in patterns of intuition motivating contextualism. The chapter also reviews the ways in which epistemologists have tried to use psychological research to explain, and in some cases explain away, the intuitions motivating contextualism. One major body of relevant research is dual process theory, according to which there are two broad types of judgment, intuitive and reflective.
