On The Case For Contextualism

My purpose in this paper is to evaluate the case for contextualism, the doctrine that the relation expressed by “know” relative to a context is determined in part by the standards of justification salient in that context. As Keith DeRose, one of its chief proponents, writes: ... according to contextualist theories of knowledge attributions, how strong a subject's epistemic position must be to make true a speaker's attribution of knowledge to that subject is a flexible matter that can vary according to features of the speaker's conversational context. Central to contextualism, then, is the notion of (relative) strength of epistemic position. 1 According to the contextualist, the relation expressed by the word" know" relative to a context is determined in part by the degree of epistemic strength relevant in that context. So, the contextualist allows that in some context c, the relation expressed by" know" relative to c is such that Hannah may stand in that relation to a proposition despite only having weak inductive evidence for the truth of that proposition. Relative to another context c', Hannah would then not stand in the relation expressed by" know" in c'to that proposition, because in c', the salient degree of epistemic strength is higher than the degree of epistemic strength in c.