Introduction

The existence of epistemic contextualism refutes the tired complaint that there is nothing new in philosophy. Epistemological questions about the possibility, the nature, and the extent of human knowledge are as old as philosophy itself; seeking insight by placing these questions alongside more distinctively semantic questions about the language we use to talk about knowledge is an innovation of the twentieth century. It wasn’t until the late twentieth century, once semanticists and philosophers of language created a formal apparatus for representing indexicals, that contextualism was even articulable. ¹ Many contemporary epistemologists now hold that these linguistic questions have critical epistemological implications.