On The Linguistic Basis For Contextualism

My purpose in this paper is to investigate whether the features contextualists impute to natural language knowledge ascriptions are in fact all present. My discussion will not be exhaustive; I aim simply to explore some of the apparent linguistic commitments of contextualism. I begin with a brief review of some of the intuitive linguistic evidence for contextualism. On the contextu-alist view, knowledge relations come in varying degrees of strength, depending upon the epistemic position of the knowledge-attributor. This suggests that the word" know", like adjectives such as" tall" and" flat", is gradable. My first task is to evaluate the claim that" know" is gradable, and assess the significance of the results. Secondly, I assess an argument for contextualism about" know", due to Stewart Cohen, which involves the gradable expression" justified". Third, I explore the background model of context sensitivity assumed by the …