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6 Contextualism in Epistemology and the Context-Sensitivity of ‘Knows’ Robert J. Stainton The central issue of this essay is whether contextualism in epistemology is genuinely in conflict with recent claims that ‘know’ is not in fact a contextsensitive word. To address this question, I will first rehearse three key aims of contextualists and the broad strategy they adopt for achieving them. I then introduce two linguistic arguments to the effect that the lexical item ‘know’ is not context sensitive, one from Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore, one from Jason Stanley. I find these and related arguments quite compelling. In particular, I think Cappelen and Lepore (2003, 2005a) show pretty definitively that ‘know’ is not like ‘I’/‘here’/‘now’, and Stanley (2004) shows that ‘know’ is not like ‘tall’/‘rich’.1 One could try to find another model for ‘know’. Instead, I consider whether one can rescue ‘‘the spirit of contextualism in epistemology’’—that is, achieve its aims by deploying a strategy of appealing to speaker context—even while granting that ‘know’ isn’t a context-sensitive word at all. My conclusion, in a nutshell , is this: If there are pragmatic determinants of what is asserted/stated, and contextualism can overcome independent problems not having to do specifically with the context-sensitivity of the word ‘know’, then the spirit of contextualism can be salvaged. Even though, for reasons sketched by the aforementioned authors, ‘know’ doesn’t actually belong in the class of context-sensitive words. The Spirit of Contextualism At a minimum, contextualists have three multifaceted aims. First, they wish to respond to skepticism by ‘‘splitting the difference’’ between (apparently true) knowledge claims made in ordinary contexts, and (apparently false) knowledge claims, about the same topic, made in the face of skeptical arguments. The idea is that two such claims aren’t actually in conflict, despite the same words being used about the same knower, because the speakings implicitly state different things—and this because the shift in context has changed the standards for knowledge, and standards are implicitly part of any claim to know. This allows ordinary speakers to make true knowledge attributions, while also explaining the genuine pull of skepticism. (And let me stress: The aim is to secure true assertions of knowledge , not just ones which, though strictly speaking false, are reasonable or practical, or which merely convey something true, etc. See DeRose 1999, 187–188.) Gail Stine (1976, 254) puts the general desideratum nicely: It is an essential characteristic of our concept of knowledge that tighter criteria are appropriate in different contexts. It is one thing in a street encounter, another in a classroom, another in a law court—and who is to say it cannot be another in a philosophical discussion? . . . We can point out that some philosophers are very perverse in their standards (by some extreme standard, there is some reason to think there is an evil genius, after all)—but we cannot legitimately go so far as to say that their perversity has stretched the concept of knowledge out of all recognition—in fact they have played on an essential feature of the concept. On the other hand, a skeptical philosopher is wrong if he holds that others are wrong in any way—i.e., are sloppy, speaking only loosely, or whatever—when they say we know a great deal. Yet, in letting in contextual standards, we do not want to say that ‘know’ is ambiguous, between a ‘‘high-standard’’ and a ‘‘low-standard’’ sense. First, this postulates ambiguities without adequate warrant. Second, there don’t seem to be just two standards, there seem to be many. And they seem to vary along many different dimensions—how strongly the proposition must be believed, what degree of felt certainty is required, how well the proposition must be justified and by what means, how important for successful action the truth of the believed proposition is, and so forth. (For a taste of the complexities here, see Unger 1986.) Second, contemporary contextualists want the attributor’s standards to play a part in what is asserted, when we make knowledge claims. It isn’t just the standards of the person who is said to know, but also the standards of the person attributing knowledge that can make two assertions of the same form—for instance, ‘Keith knows that the bank is open’—said about the same knower who is in exactly the same circumstances, express different propositions. Thus, for example, Keith’s spouse can utter these words...

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