The Case for Contextualism

Epistemic contextualism is the view that the truth‐conditions of knowledge attributions depend on the context of the attributor. One speaker L in an ordinary context with relaxed standards for knowledge might say something true by uttering ‘Moore knows he has hands’, while another speaker H in a more demanding context with tighter standards for knowledge might say something true by uttering ‘Moore does not know he has hands’. There is no contradiction: a sentence can have different truth‐conditions in different contexts of utterance. Support for contextualism comes both from the discussion of cases and from more theory‐driven reasons. Traditional views of knowledge are ‘invariantist’ in so far as they deny such attributor‐sensitivity. According to a recent, ‘non‐classical’, form, ‘subject‐sensitive invariantism’ (SSI), non‐epistemic (not truth‐related) factors like practical interests in the situation of the subject S determine the standards, and thus whether S knows a given proposition: I might know that it is not going to rain today if nothing much depends on it for me, but if I am planning an important picnic then I might not know it

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