Contextualism and Testimony

Abstract

It has recently been argued that Subject-Sensitive Invariantism conflicts with an attractive testimonial principle of transmission. One might think, given the differences between Subject-Sensitive Invariantism and Contextualism, the latter would not be susceptible to related objections. I argue however that some testimonial principles with much intuitive appeal give us a related though different reason to reject Contextualism. In short, while some argue that Subject-Sensitive Invariantism seems to sometimes make testimonial knowledge too easy to come by, I argue that Contextualism seems to often make testimonial knowledge too hard to come by. Contextualism then does not enjoy an advantage over Subject-Sensitive Invariantism when it comes to capturing the transmissive role of knowledge.