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In this paper we survey some main arguments for and against epistemological contextualism. We distinguish and discuss various kinds of contextualism, such as (the most influential version of which is , or ); , or and . Starting with a sketch of Dretske’s Relevant Alternatives Theory and Nozick’s Tracking Account of Knowledge, we reconstruct the history of various forms of contextualism and the ways contextualists try to handle some notorious epistemological quandaries, especially skepticism and the lottery paradox. Then we outline the most important problems that contextualist theories face, and give overviews of their criticisms and defenses as developed in this issue.

Externalism about knowledge commits one to a modest form of contextualism: whether one knows depends (or may depend) on circumstances (context) of which one has no knowledge. Such modest contextualism requires the rejection of the KK Principle (If knows that , then knows that knows that — something most people would want to reject anyway — but it does not require (though it is compatible with) a rejection of closure. Radical contextualism, on the other hand, goes a step farther and relativizes knowledge not just to the circumstances of the knower, but to the circumstances of the person attributing knowledge. I reject this more radical form of contextualism and suggest that it confuses (or that it can, at least, be avoided by carefully distinguishing) the relativity in what is said to know from the relativity in whether knows what is said to know.

According to Fred Dretske’s externalist theory of knowledge a subject knows that if and only if she believes that and this belief is caused or causally sustained by the information that . Another famous feature of Dretske’s epistemology is his denial that knowledge is closed under known logical entailment. I argue that, given Dretske’s construal of information, he is in fact committed to the view that both information and knowledge closed under known entailment. This has far-reaching consequences. For if it is true that, as Dretske also believes, accepting closure leads to skepticism, he must either embrace skepticism or abandon his information theory of knowledge. The latter alternative would seem to be preferable. But taking this route would deprive one of the most powerfully developed externalist epistemologies of its foundation.

Skeptics try to persuade us of our ignorance with arguments like the following: 1. I don’t know that I am not a handless brain-in-a-vat [BIV]. 2. If I don’t know that I am not a handless BIV, then I don’t know that I have hands. Therefore, 3. I don’t know that I have hands. The BIV argument is valid, its premises are intuitively compelling, and yet, its conclusion strikes us as absurd. Something has to go, but what? Contextualists contend that an adequate solution to the skeptical problem must: (i) retain epistemic closure, (ii) explain the intuitive force of skeptical arguments by explaining why their premises initially seem so compelling, and (iii) account for the truth of our commonsense judgment that we do possess lots of ordinary knowledge. Contextualists maintain that the key to such a solution is recognizing that the semantic standards for ‘knows’ vary from context to context such that in skeptical contexts the skeptic’s premises are true and so is her conclusion; but in ordinary contexts, her conclusion is false and so is her first premise. Despite its initial attractiveness, the contextualist solution comes at a significant cost, for contextualism has many counterintuitive results. After presenting the contextualist solution, I identify a number of these costs. I then offer a noncontextualist solution that meets the adequacy constraint identified above, while avoiding the costs associated with contextualism. Hence, one of the principal reasons offered for adopting a contextualist theory of knowledge — its supposedly unique ability to adequately resolve the skeptical problem — is undermined.

David Hume

Mylan Engel’s paper (2004) is divided into two parts: a negative part, criticizing the ‘costs of contextualism’ and a constructive part proposing a ‘non-contextualist resolution of the skeptical problem.’ I will only address the constructive part here. The constructive part is composed of three elements: (i) a ‘reconstruction’ or ‘reformulation’ of the original skeptical argument, which draws on the notion of (e-possibility), (ii) a distinction between two senses of ‘knowledge’ (and two corresponding kinds of e-possibility): and , and (iii) an argument which tries to hoist the skeptic by their own petard, namely the closure principle (CP). As I will argue, there are two ways to understand Engel’s antiskeptical argument. Only in one interpretation does the argument depend on the proposed ‘reconstruction’ of the skeptical argument in terms of e-possibility. But this version of the argument is unsound. More importantly, the skeptic has a strong objection at her disposal, which applies to both interpretations of the argument. If this objection is valid, Engel’s argument does not hold. But once it is invalidated, his argument is superfluous.

Contextualists often argue from examples where it seems true to say in one context that a person knows something but not true to say that in another context where skeptical hypotheses have been introduced. The skeptical hypotheses can be moderate, simply mentioning what might be the case or raising questions about what a person is certain of, or radical, where scenarios about demon worlds, brains in vats, The Matrix, etc., are introduced. I argue that the introduction of these skeptical hypotheses leads people to fallaciously infer that it is no longer true to say that the relevant person knows. I believe that that is a better explanation of the so- called intuition that the person does not know than the contextualist’s who claim that raising these skeptical hypotheses changes the standards that determine when it is true to say “ knows that .” At the end I raise the possibility that contextualists might defend their view on pragmatic rather than skeptical grounds by arguing that the standards of evidence rise when more is at stake in a practical sense.

David Lewis, Stewart Cohen, and Keith DeRose have proposed that sentences of the form “ knows ” are indexical, and therefore differ in truth value from one context to another. On their , the truth value of “ knows ” is determined by whether S meets the epistemic standards of the speaker’s context. I will not be concerned with forms of contextualism, according to which the truth value of “ knows ” is determined by the standards of the subject ’s context, regardless of the standards applying to the speaker making the knowledge claim. Relational contextualism is a form of normative relativism. Indexical contextualism is a semantic theory. When the subject is the speaker, as when “” is the first person pronoun “I” the two forms of contextualism coincide. But otherwise, they diverge. I critically examine the principal arguments for indexicalism, detail linguistic evidence against it, and suggest a pragmatic alternative.

Wayne Davis (2004) argues against the thesis that knowledge claims are indexical, and he presents an alternative account of the contextual variability of our use of “ knows .” In this commentary I focus on the following three points. First, I want to supplement Davis’s considerations about the inability of indexicalism to deal with “skeptical paradoxes” by considering what the consequence would be if the indexicalist’s explanation of these paradoxes were satisfactory. Second, I am going to take a brief look at Davis’s alternative theory. Third, in the main part of my commentary I try to show that indexicalism may be true in spite of the linguistic evidence Davis presents against it.

Conversational contextualism states that the truth-conditions expressed by knowledge-attributing sentences vary relative to the context of utterance. This context is determined partly by different standards the person involved must meet in order to make the sentence true. I am concerned with the question of how these standards can be raised or lowered, and especially what happens to the standards and the conversational score when parties in a discussion push the conversational scores in different directions. None of the available options for an answer seems satisfying. I argue that this results from a misunderstanding of the characteristics of the situation at hand.

Wayne Davis (2004) argues against the thesis that knowledge claims are indexical, and he presents an alternative account of the contextual variability of our use of “ knows .” In this commentary I focus on the following three points. First, I want to supplement Davis’s considerations about the inability of indexicalism to deal with “skeptical paradoxes” by considering what the consequence would be if the indexicalist’s explanation of these paradoxes were satisfactory. Second, I am going to take a brief look at Davis’s alternative theory. Third, in the main part of my commentary I try to show that indexicalism may be true in spite of the linguistic evidence Davis presents against it.