Contextualism in Epistemology

Abstract

In epistemology, contextualism is the view that the truth-conditions of knowledge claims vary with the contexts in which those claims are made. This article surveys the main arguments for contextualism, describes a variety of different approaches to developing the view, and discusses how contextualism has been used to treat the problem of radical skepticism. Many different objections to contextualism have appeared since the view first achieved prominence. This article explores and responds to a range of objections to contextualism, focusing particularly those arising from aspects of the linguistic behavior of the word “know” and its cognates. Finally, several alternatives to contextualism are described, including: traditional invariantism, contextualism’s original opponent; subject-sensitive invariantism, which emerged as a way of accommodating the primary data that motivates contextualism within an invariantist framework; and relativism, a new competitor according to which the truth-conditions of knowledge claims vary not with the context in which they are made, but the context in which they are assessed.