‘Knowledge’ and Quantifiers

Contextualism is a linguistic thesis about the word ‘knows’. Roughly, it is the thesis that the truth-conditions of knowledge ascriptions are sensitive to features embedded in the conversational context of the ascription. Whether a subject can truly be said to ‘know’ a proposition, on this view, thus shifts along with shifts in the relevant features of the conversational context. Now exactly what features ascriptions are sensitive to has been cashed out in different ways by different proponents of contextualism; ¹ however, what they all share is a common commitment to this pattern of ‘shifty’ truth-conditions for knowledge ascriptions. ² As such, contextualism has two distinct components, one semantic, the other epistemic. The epistemic component has to do with the relationship between ‘knowing’ and shifts in evidential standards. The semantic component, by contrast, concerns the vindication of the claim that ‘knows’ is a context-sensitive term. Often, this vindication proceeds through the presentation of arguments suggesting that the pattern of use exhibited by knowledge ascriptions is consistent with their fitting within a broader family of context-sensitive terms. Different contextualists have taken knowledge ascriptions to be subsumable under different families of context-sensitive terms. DeRose, among others, has argued that ‘knows’ is best understood as an indexical such as ‘I’. ³ Cohen, by contrast, has argued that ‘knows’ is best understood as functioning in a similar manner to gradable adjectives like ‘tall’ or ‘flat’. ⁴ And Lewis, Ichikawa, and Blome-Tillmann have argued that ‘knows’ is best understood as having a semantic role analogous to a universal quantifier. ⁵