Philosophical Studies, 2000

The paper I gave at the conference has subsequently split into two papers. The other descendant of the original paper (Stanley (forthcoming)) focuses on developing a noncontextualist account of knowledge that captures the intuitive data as well as contextualism. Discussion with the participants at the conference at the University of Massachusetts was very helpful. I should single out John Hawthorne and my commentator Barbara Partee for special mention; e-mails with Stewart Cohen since then have also been invaluable. I am also indebted for discussion to Forthcoming in Philosophical Studies Contextualism in epistemology is the doctrine that the proposition expressed by a knowledge attribution relative to a context is determined 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.

Metaphilosophy, 2020

The debate concerning epistemic contextualism represents a kind of linguistic turn in epistemology, where the focus has shifted from theorising about knowledge to theorising about knowledge attributions. Such a shift may well prove valuable, but only if we are clear on what the relationship is between a semantic analysis of knowledge attributions and a philosophical analysis of knowledge. One plausible approach is to claim that the semantic analysis entails and is entailed by the philosophical analysis. Yet this view-referred to here as the default view-has been explicitly adopted by few in the contextualism debate. This paper considers a form of argument in favour of the default view, and then considers the challenges that arise from either accepting or rejecting the default view.

2007

Epistemic contextualism (EC) is primarily a semantic view, viz. the view that ‘knowledge’-ascriptions can change their contents with the conversational context. To be more precise, EC is the view that the predicate ‘know’ has an unstable Kaplan character, i.e. a character that does not map all contexts on the same content. According to EC, ‘know’ is thus an indexical expression. Notwithstanding this purely linguistic characterisation of EC, contextualists have traditionally argued that their views have considerable philosophical impact, this being due to the alleged fact that their linguistic views about ‘know’ provide the resources for a resolution of sceptical puzzles. In this paper I will address an objection to EC claiming that, as a linguistic view about the term ‘know’, EC cannot be of any epistemological significance.

Erkenntnis, 2013

This paper explores how the purpose of the concept of knowledge affects knowledge ascriptions in natural language. I appeal to the idea that the role of the concept of knowledge is to flag reliable informants, and I use this idea to illuminate and support contextualism about 'knows'. I argue that practical pressures that arise in an epistemic state of nature provide an explanatory basis for a brand of contextualism that I call 'practical interests contextualism'. I also answer some questions that contextualism leaves open, particularly why the concept of knowledge is valuable, why the word 'knows' exhibits context-variability, and why this term enjoys such widespread use. Finally, I show how my contextualist framework accommodates plausible ideas from two rival views: subject-sensitive invariantism and insensitive invariantism. This provides new support for contextualism and develops this view in a way that improves our understanding of the concept of knowledge.

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2015

In epistemology, contextualism is the view that the truth-conditions of knowledge claims vary with the contexts in which those claims are made. This article surveys the main arguments for contextualism, describes a variety of different approaches to developing the view, and discusses how contextualism has been used to treat the problem of radical skepticism. It then presents and responds to a range of objections to contextualism arising from aspects of the linguistic behavior of the word `know' and its cognates. Finally, several alternatives to contextualism are presented, including traditional invariantism, subject-sensitive invariantism, and relativism.

Modeling and Using Context, 2005

According to the thesis of epistemological contextualism, the truth conditions of sentences of the form 'S knows that P' and 'S does not know that P' vary according to the context in which they are uttered, where this variation is due to the semantics of 'knows'. Among the linguistic data that have been offered in support of epistemological contextualism are cases that are ordinary in the sense that they involve a consideration neither of skeptical hypotheses nor of skeptical arguments. Both Stewart Cohen and Keith DeRose, contextualism's two most prominent proponents, provide such cases. In a recent paper, DeRose goes so far as to claim that such cases provide the best grounds for accepting contextualism. 1 In what follows, we argue that these cases do not support contextualism. In fact, they point in the direction of epistemological invariantism-the thesis that sentences of the form 'S knows that P' and 'S does not know that P' do not vary according to the context in which they are uttered.

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.

Philosophical Books, 2007