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In this paper I will discuss Michael Williams’s inferential contextualism — a position that must be carefully distinguished from the currently more fashionable attributed contextualism. I will argue that Williams’s contextualism is not stable, though it avoids some of the shortcomings of simple inferential contextualism. In particular, his criticism of epistemological realism cannot be supported on the basis of his own account. I will also argue that we need not give up epistemological realism in order to provide a successful diagnosis of scepticism.

Any contextualist approach to knowledge has to provide a plausible definition of the concept of context and spell out the mechanisms of context changes. Since it is the dynamics of context change that carry the main weight of the contextualist position, not every mechanism will be capable of filling that role. In particular, I argue that one class of mechanisms that is most popularly held to account for context changes, namely those that arise out of shifts of conversational parameters in discourses involving knowledge claims, are not suited to the job because they cannot account for the genuinely epistemic nature of the context shift. A form of epistemic contextualism that defines the context through the structure of our epistemic projects is suggested. Context changes in this account are linked to changes in the background assumptions operative in our epistemic projects and the methods used to carry out our inquiries.

According to Antonia Barke’s version of contextualism, epistemic contextualism, a context is defined by a method and its associated assumptions. The subject has to make the assumption that the method is adequate or reliable and that good working conditions hold in order to arrive at knowledge by employing the method. I will criticize Barke’s claim that epistemic contextualism can provide a more satisfactory explanation or motivation for context shifts than conversational contextualism (in particular, David Lewis’s contextualism). Two more points of criticism will be presented, which are meant to show that epistemic contextualism presupposes epistemic internalism, and that epistemicc) contextualism leads to an implausible view about which parameters the special achievement that is constitutive of knowledge depends on. I suggest that, contra epistemicc) contextualism, knowledge is a more robust phenomenon that does not depend on whether anyone calls into question any assumptions or raises skeptical doubts in conversation or in his or her mind (as, for example, Fred Dretske’s account says). I indicate how this can be reconciled with the phenomenon that knowledge attributions are somewhat unstable and seemingly context-dependent.

A number of virtue epistemologists endorse the following thesis: Knowledge is true belief resulting from intellectual virtue, where ’s true belief results from intellectual virtue just in case S believes the truth is intellectually virtuous. This thesis commits one to a sort of contextualism about knowledge attributions. This is because, in general, sentences of the form “ occurred because occurred” require a contextualist treatment. This sort of contextualism is contrasted with more familiar versions. It is argued that the position: (a) yields a better solution to the lottery problem, and (b) may be grounded in a more general theory of virtue and credit.

John Greco has proposed a new sort of contextualism which exhibits a principled grounding in an agent reliabilist virtue epistemology. In this paper I will discuss Greco’s two main reasons in favor of virtue contextualism. The first reason is that his account of knowledge can be derived from a more general theory of virtue and credit. The second reason consists in the thesis that a virtue contextualist solution to the lottery problem is superior to standards contextualism. With regard to the first claim, I raise some questions concerning the status and the content of the crucial conditions for Greco’s theory of intellectual credit. With regard to the second claim, I try to show that his arguments do not succeed in establishing the superiority of virtue contextualism to standards contextualism. I close with some remarks on the relation among Greco’s virtue contextualism, the traditional approach to the theory of knowledge and the proper domain of contextualism.

There are many ordinary propositions we think we know. Almost every ordinary proposition entails some “lottery proposition” which we think we do not know but to which we assign a high probability of being true (for instance: “I will never be a multi-millionaire” entails “I will not win this lottery”). How is this possible — given that some closure principle is true? This problem, also known as “the Lottery puzzle”, has recently provoked a lot of discussion. In this paper I discuss one of the most promising answers to the problem: Stewart Cohen’s contextualist solution, which is based on ideas about the salience of chances of error. After presenting some objections to it I sketch an alternative solution which is still contextualist in spirit.

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.

In this article, we present an analysis of defeasible generalizations — generalizations which are essentially exception-laden, yet genuinely explanatory — in terms of various notions of privileged conditions. We argue that any plausible epistemology must make essential use of defeasible generalizations so understood. We also consider the epistemic significance of the sort of understanding of context that is required for understanding of explanatory defeasible generalizations on any topic.

Do we need defeasible generalizations in epistemology, generalizations that are genuinely explanatory yet ineliminably exception-laden? Do we need them to endow our epistemology with a substantial explanatory structure? Mark Lance and Margaret Little argue for the claim that we do. I will argue that we can just as well do without them — at least in epistemology. So in the paper, I am trying to very briefly sketch an alternative contextualist picture. More specifically, the claim will be that although an epistemic contextualist should commit himself to epistemic holism he can nevertheless appeal to epistemic principles other than defeasible generalizations in order to provide his epistemology with a structure.

In this paper I discuss the relation between various properties that have been regarded as important for determining whether or not a belief constitutes a piece of knowledge: its stability, strength and sensitivity to truth, as well as the strength of the epistemic position in which the subject is with respect to this belief. Attempts to explicate the relevant concepts more formally with the help of systems of spheres of possible worlds (ü la Lewis and Grove) must take care to keep apart the very different roles that systems of spheres can play. Nozick’s sensitivity account turns out to be closer to the stability analysis of knowledge (versions of which I identify in Plato, Descartes, Klein and Lehrer) than one might have suspected.