Contextualism and Scepticism: Even-Handedness, Factivity and Surreptitiously Raising Standards

The central contentions of this paper are two: first, that contextualism about knowledge cannot fulfil the eirenic promise which, for those who are drawn to it, constitutes, I believe, its main attraction; secondly, that the basic diagnosis of epistemological scepticism as somehow entrapping us, by diverting attention from a surreptitious shift to a special rarefied intellectual context, rests on inattention to the details of the principal sceptical paradoxes. These contentions are consistent with knowledge‐contextualism, of some stripe or other, being true. What follows will not bear directly on that.