Blackwell Reference Online

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In epistemology, “contextualism” denotes a wide variety of more-or-less closely related positions according to which the issues of knowledge or justification are somehow relative to context. I will proceed by first explicating the position I call contextualism, and distinguishing that position from some closely related positions in epistemology, some of which sometimes also go by the name of “contextualism.” I'll then present and answer what seems to many the most pressing of the objections to contextualism as I construe it, and also indicate some of the main positive motivations for accepting the view. Among the epistemologists I've spoken with who have an opinion on the matter, I think it's fair to say a majority reject contextualism. However, the resistance has to this point been largely underground, with little by way of sustained arguments against contextualism appearing in the journals, though I have begun to see various papers in manuscript form which are critical of contextualism. Here, I'll respond to the criticism of contextualism that, in my travels, I have found to be the most pervasive in producing suspicion about the view. As I use it, and as I think the term is most usefully employed, “contextualism” refers to the position that the truth-conditions of knowledge ascribing and knowledge denying sentences (sentences of the form “S knows that P” and “S doesn't know ... log in or subscribe to read full text