1 Contextualism and the Factivity of Knowledge

Analytic epistemology in the post-Gettier era has mainly focused on the task of providing an analysis, perhaps a definition, of the “common ” notion of knowledge. In the last two or three decades, this project has seen a major “linguistic turn ” (Ludlow 2005), through the increased reliance, in contemporary debates, on syntactic, semantic and pragmatic “evidence ” about usual (uses of) linguistic constructions in terms of know, the main working assumption being that the common notion of knowledge – that is, the way we (ought to) commonly think about knowledge – is best reflected in the way we commonly talk about knowledge. A consequence is that instead of trying to spell out directly the conditions for knowledge, the focus is on try-ing to spell out the conditions for the truth of knowledge attributions. Constitutive of this “new linguistic turn ” in epistemology is “contextualism”, the view that the reference of the verb know shifts with features of the context in which it is used. To criticize this view will be the main purpose of the present paper. More precisely, the project of the pa-per can be sketched as follows: Standard contextualism about know comes in two versions. In the first, know is treated as an indexical. In the second, it is treated both as an indexical and as