Semantic (in)sensitivity: The relevance of Cappelen and Lepore’s linguistic tests in the debate about the contextualist thesis on the meaning of the concept of knowledge

Abstract

The emergence of contextualism in epistemology has set off a philosophical debate over the semantic nature of the concept of knowledge, that is to say over whether the meaning of that concept is invariant or context-sensitive. While some proponents of contextualist view defend the notion that the meaning of knowledge is indexical in its nature, Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore argue that there exist only a few expressions which possess this semantic trait, and that knowledge expressions are not among them. Evidence in support of their position, according to the authors, is provided by linguistic tests. In this article we examine whether linguistic tests provide a reliable indicator of the semantic nature of the concept of knowledge.