2008. Relevant Alternatives Contextualism and Ordinary Contingent Knowledge

According to David Lewis ’ contextualist analysis of knowledge, there can be contexts in which a subject counts as knowing a proposition just because every possibility that this proposition might be false is irrelevant in these contexts. In this paper I argue that, in some cases at least, Lewis ’ analysis results in granting people non-evidentially based knowledge of ordinary contingent truths which, intuitively, cannot be known but on the basis of appropriate evidence. In his 1996 paper ‘Elusive Knowledge’, David Lewis, one of the leading proponents of epistemological contextualism, offers an intriguing analysis of knowledge according to which there can be contexts in which a subject counts as knowing a proposition just because in these contexts every possibility that this proposition might be false is properly being ignored. This idea of an ‘ignorance-based knowledge ’ is supposed to help us deal with some aspects of the problem of skepticism. In this paper I hold that it can be of no such help for it has an untenable consequence: in some cases it results in granting people non-evidentially based knowledge of ordinary contingent truths about which it is nonetheless intuitively absurd to think that they could be known in the absence of appropriate evidence.