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Contextualism In Epistemology And The Context Sensitivity Of 'Knows', Robert J. Stainton

Robert J. Stainton

The central issue of this paper is whether contextualism in epistemology is genuinely in conflict with recent claims that ‘know’ is not in fact a context sensitive word. To address this question, I’ll first rehearse three key aims of contextualists and the broad strategy they adopt for achieving them. I then introduce two linguistic arguments to the effect that the lexical item ‘know’ is not context sensitive: one from Herman Cappelen & Ernie Lepore, one from Jason Stanley. I find these and related arguments quite compelling. In particular, I think Cappelen & Lepore (2003, 2005a) show pretty definitively that ‘know’ …