ABSTRACT
In the context of this volume, we will assume that readers already have a reasonable understanding of what Contextualism in Epistemology says, and what work it does in the theory of knowledge. By way of a briefest reminder, and very crudely, one can read it as the conjunction of two clauses: (i) knowledge attributions may shift their truth conditions according to the standards at play in the utterance context; and as a result, (ii) one can reconcile the allure of skeptical arguments with ordinary intuition by holding that there is cross-talk. Goes the idea, the skeptic, who says we almost never know, and the anti-skeptic, who says we very frequently know, are not really disagreeing, but talking past each other because they state different things with ‘know’. Granting that this would be a happy result for epistemology, notice that Contextualism encompasses a descriptive empirical claim about linguistic meaning in context: they are not making a point (directly) about knowledge, but about the word ‘know’.
