How to Preserve Our Intuitions about Knowledge and “Knows”

Contextualists maintain that the truth-values of knowledge attributions vary from conversational context to conversational context. In one conversational context, a knowledge attribution may express a true proposition; in another conversational context, the same attribution may express a false proposition.1 Almost invariably, contextualists defend their position as necessary for preserving our intuitions in the face of the so-called “skeptical paradox.”2 Contextualists often proceed, not by appealing to linguistic data, but by arguing that contextualism uniquely preserves our commonsense belief that we know a lot and our philosophical belief that skeptical hypotheses destroy knowledge and our unqualified commitment to closure.3 As its defenders make clear, contextualism is a linguistic thesis. Rather than a theory about knowledge, it is a theory about the word “knows.”4 In this paper, I attempt to undermine the case for contextualism by showing how an epistemic thesis—that is, a theory of knowledge—might preserve our intuitions where contextualism cannot. In what follows, I outline the contextualist solution to a familiar skeptical paradox. After highlighting the intuitions at stake, I present several compelling objections leveled against contextualism by Kent Bach. I conclude by pointing the way to a theory of knowledge that might preserve our intuitions where contextualism fails. My contention in this paper is neither that thi