ABSTRACT
What does “knowledge” mean? What should “knowledge” mean? This chapter is about the connection between these two questions. In particular, I will argue that if we endorse a certain view about the meaning of “knowledge”, namely, epistemic contextualism, according to which the meaning of “knowledge” varies from context to context depending on the standards of the speaker, then it seems plausible to say that when we utter sentences of the form “S knows that p”, we are not only saying something about whether S knows that p (according to our standards), but we are also communicating information about the way the term “knows” should be used. I will also argue that discussions about how the term “knows” should be used are discussions that are worth having, since they are connected with important issues of practical significance.
