ABSTRACT
The use of ‘S knows p’ varies from context to context. Contextualist theories hypothesize that the truth conditions of ‘S knows p’ vary with things like salience, interests, and stakes. They promise to dissolve the problem of skepticism. I argue that the contextual variation results from pragmatic factors. The cases promising a philosophical payoff for contextualism involve variation in belief (Davis 2015): the speaker expresses different beliefs about whether S knows p. The everyday cases providing the best evidence for contextualism involve loose use (Davis 2007): the speaker means that S is close enough to knowing p for different purposes. Loose use is a common form of implicature related to hyperbole and irony. The loose-use account requires a strong invariant semantics, but not skepticism.
