Non-sceptical Infallibilism

Abstract

Scepticism has always been a problem for epistemology. The last decades of the twentieth century saw the rise of some innovative approaches to knowledge and justification claiming that they can allay sceptical worries. One of the most influential of these is epistemic contextualism, which builds on ‘relevant alternatives’ theories like Dretske’s (1970, 1981) setting forth new epistemological grounds. Authors such as Cohen (1986, 1987, 1988) and DeRose (1992, 1995) have forcefully argued that knowledge ascriptions are context-dependent or context-sensitive. This means that the sceptic cannot set the bar of epistemic demand higher than what the situation, according to reasonable presuppositions, permits. The contextualist answer is perfectly sound in regard to local sceptical scenarios. But it has its limitations too, namely the fact that it apparently cannot avoid radical scepticism. It should, thus, come as no surprise that Cohen (1988) has explicitly equated contextualism...