How to Be a Contextualist

Abstract

According to Keith DeRose, epistemological contextualism is the position that “the truth-conditions of knowledge ascribing and knowledge denying sentences (sentences of the form “S knows that p” and “S doesn’t know that p”...) vary in certain ways according to the context in which they are uttered. What so varies is the epistemic standards that S must meet... in order for such a statement to be true”.1 According to the contextualist, a sentence of the form “S knows that p” does not express a complete proposition. Different utterances of the sentence, in different contexts of utterance, can express different propositions: “know” is context-dependent. Little attention has been paid to a precise formulation of the semantic contextualist thesis grounding epistemological contextualism. Many scholars refer to some kind of “hidden-indexical” theory of knowledge sentences, or claim that “know” is itself indexical. My goal is then to assess differences and similarities between “know” and context-sensitive terms in natural language—in particular pure indexicals, on the one hand, and demonstratives, on the other hand. This paper is structured as follows. In section 2, I briefly present a standard version of epistemological contextualism. In section 3, I sketch the contextualist response to scepticism. In section 4, I present the general semantic thesis grounding epistemological contextualism. In section 5 and 6, I examine and criticise a strategy in terms of pure indexicals. In section 7 and 8, I examine and criticise a strategy in terms of demonstratives. In the conclusion, I 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, and of its response to the sceptic.