Contextualism in epistemology and the context sensitivity of ‘knows

The central issue of this essay is whether contextualism in epistemology is genuinely in conflict with recent claims that ‘know ’ is not in fact a context-sensitive word. To address this question, I will first rehearse three key aims of contextualists and the broad strategy they adopt for achieving them. I then introduce two linguistic arguments to the effect that the lexical item ‘know ’ is not context sensitive, one from Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore, one from Jason Stanley. I find these and related arguments quite compelling. In particular, I think Cappelen and Lepore (2003, 2005a) show pretty definitively that ‘know ’ is not like ‘I’/‘here’/‘now’, and Stanley (2004) shows that ‘know ’ is not like ‘tall’/‘rich’.1 One could try to find an-other model for ‘know’. Instead, I consider whether one can rescue ‘‘the spirit of contextualism in epistemology’’—that is, achieve its aims by deploying a strategy of appealing to speaker context—even while granting that ‘know ’ isn’t a context-sensitive word at all. My conclusion, in a nut-shell, is this: If there are pragmatic determinants of what is asserted/stated