The principle of deductive closure of knowledge and contextualism

Abstract

The hypotheses of radical skeptics are so conceived to put the attributor of knowledge in such position that she can?t ascribe knowledge to anyone, because the subject can?t get proper evidence to exclude skeptical alternatives. There are several versions of the skeptical arguments by which she tries to point out the impossibility of knowledge ascriptions as direct consequence of the impossibility to rule out skeptical alternatives. All of those arguments are based on a very intuitive epistemological principle: if we know p, and if we know that p implies q, then we know q as well. This principle is called the principle of deductive closure of knowledge (or simply closure). In this paper, the author analyzes the most important contextualist solutions to the skeptic paradox, those that accept the closure principle, and those that reject it as well.