Epistemological Contextualism: A Semantic Perspective

Abstract

AbstractAccording to epistemological contextualism, a sentence of the form “S knows that p” doesn’t express a complete proposition. Different utterances of the sentence, in different contexts, can express different propositions: “know” is context-dependent. This paper deals with the semantic contextualist thesis grounding epistemological contextualism. We examine various kinds of linguistic context dependence, which could be relevant to epistemological contextualism: ambiguity, ellipsis, indexicality, context-sensitivity of scalar predicates, dependence on standards of precision. We argue that only an accurate analysis of the different varieties of context sensitivity secures us a better understanding and a clearer evaluation of the contextualist approach.KeywordsTravel AgencyEpistemic PositionKnowledge AttributionContextualist ApproachEpistemic StandardThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.