Greco’s explanatory salience contextualism revisited

Abstract

According to Greco’s early explanatory salience contextualism, S knows that p if and only if S’s cognitive abilities are the salient factor in a causal explanation of why S holds a true belief rather than a false belief or no belief at all. Greco abandoned this view because it cannot handle fake barn cases and because it proves impossible to analyze knowledge in terms of a quantitative characterization of explanatory salience. The paper argues that the core idea of explanatory salience contextualism could have been saved if only the causal notion of explanation had been replaced by an abductive notion.