Contextualism in Epistemology

Contextualism in ContextIt is often said that 'it depends on the context'.In its broadest sense, contextualism in epistemology is the view that epistemic matters -whether John knows, whether Sarah's belief is justified -depend on the context.A diverse range of philosophers have defended contextualism in this broader sense: David Bloor (1991), Michel Foucault (1972), Thomas Kuhn (1970), Helen Longino (2002), Richard Rorty (1981), Ludwig Wittgenstein (1969), among others.This paper is concerned with contextualism in a narrower sense, which I'll usually just refer to as 'contextualism'.Defenders of contextualism include Stewart Cohen (1988, 1999), Keith DeRose (1995, 2009), David Lewis (1979, 1996) and Gail Stine (1976).Roughly, it is the view that the truth-conditions of sentences of the form 'S knows that p' or 'S is justified in believing p' (where S is some subject and p some proposition) depend on features of the conversational context in which they are uttered, such as which error-possibilities are salient, or how much is at stake. 1 I have three aims.First, to explain what contextualism is ( §1).Second, to outline the main arguments for contextualism ( §2).Third, to outline the main objections ( §3).I finish with avenues for future research ( §4).In the rest of this section I discuss the broader relevance and origins of contextualism.We can start with three important features of the view.First, it is primarily concerned with knowledge (or justification) ascriptions, i.e. with utterances of sentences like 'John knows that he has hands'.2 Thus, it contrasts with views primarily concerned with properties such as knowledge or justification (for instance, Annis 1978 andWilliams 1991).For instance, Longino defends 'critical contextual empiricism', on which some content A which is accepted by a community C is knowledge for C just in case A accurately represents its intended object, is supported by the data available to C and has survived critical 1 While contextualists disagree about what the features are (see Blome-Tillmann 2014, Cohen 1999, DeRose 2009, Ichikawa 2011, Lewis 1996, Neta 2002and Schaffer 2004), I set these disputes aside here.2 Throughout I distinguish between uses and mentions of words like 'knowledge'.When I am mentioning the word I put it in quotation marks.When I am using it I don't.