ABSTRACT
Epistemic contextualism (henceforth: contextualism) is, roughly, the semantic thesis that the truth-conditional contribution of “knows” varies with variations in the context of utterance. Contextualism has been surrounded by methodological disputes as long as it has existed. In fact, a large number of the debates that characterize contemporary meta-epistemology resemble the methodological disputes over contextualism. We think that this is no mere accident. Rather, the nature of and motivation for contextualism naturally raise methodological questions. What is the proper relationship between epistemology and philosophy of language? What is the role of intuitive judgments in epistemological theorizing? What is the proper response when our epistemological theories are incongruous with our folk epistemology?
