2004: ‘On the Linguistic Basis for Contextualism

Contextualism in epistemology is the doctrine that the proposition expressed by a knowledge attribution relative to a context is deter-mined in part by the standards of justification salient in that context. The (non-skeptical) contextualist allows that in some context c, a speaker may truly attribute knowledge at a time of a proposition p to Hannah, despite her possession of only weak inductive evidence for the truth of that proposition. Relative to another context, someone may make the very same knowledge attribution to Hannah, yet be speaking falsely, because the epistemic standards in that context are higher. The reason this is possible, according to the contextualist, is that the two knowledge attributions express different propositions. The main advocates of contextualism have used the semantic doctrine of contextualism to defend a certain response to the problem of skepticism. According to it, the force of the skeptical paradoxes is due to the presence of unrecognized context-sensitivity in the language. When we are not discussing with skeptics, many of our ordinary knowledge attributions are true, because what is there at issue is a less demanding sense of knowledge. But the consequence of engagement with the skeptic is that the content of knowledge attributions shifts in a manner that is not recognized by the interlocutors. In such a “skeptical ” context, knowledge attri-butions that may previously have expressed truths now express falsehoods. The contextualist therefore seeks to explain the force of skeptical arguments by appeal to a feature of ordinary language. It is because knowledge-attributions are context-sensitive that we are fooled by skeptics into thinking that even in non-skeptical circumstances, many of our knowledge attributions are false. The contextualist claim is therefore not revisionary in character. The contextualist does not claim that we ought to use “know ” as a context-sensitive expression, because that would somehow evade the skeptical para