ABSTRACT
Contextualism in epistemology has been intimately related to fallibilism, though, due to some malleability in what’s meant by “fallibilism,” that relation has been presented in different ways. In one of contextualism’s “founding documents,” Stewart Cohen (1988), presented “fallibilism” as a form of sensibleness in epistemology, and contextualism as a way of achieving it; indeed, the paper was entitled “How to Be a Fallibilist.” 1 David Lewis’s (1996) contextualist manifesto, “Elusive Knowledge,” by contrast, memorably construed “fallibilism” as a form of “madness,” and presented contextualism as providing a way to “dodge the choice” between it and the even more intrusive madness of skepticism – to steer a course “between the rock of fallibilism and the whirlpool of skepticism” (550). The apparent difference here proves to be merely verbal, based on different uses of “fallibilism” (that we’ll be in a position to quickly identify at the end of section 2).
