Jason Stanley has argued recently that Epistemic Contextualism (EC) and Subject-Sensitive Invariantism (SSI) are explanatorily on a par with regard to certain data arising from modal and temporal embeddings of ‘knowledge’-ascriptions. This paper argues against Stanley that EC has a clear advantage over SSI in the discussed field and introduces a new type of linguistic datum strongly suggesting the falsity of SSI.

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Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions

Contextualism, Subject‐Sensitive Invariantism, and the Interaction of ‘Knowledge’‐Ascriptions with Modal and Temporal Operators*

Salience and Epistemic Egocentrism: An Empirical Study

Sceptical Paths Enquiry and Doubt from Antiquity to the Present

Knowing that p requires being able to ‘rule out’ the relevant not-p alternatives. Such is the core claim of the Relevant Alternatives (RA) theorist. Of course, to endorse the core claim is not to have a complete and satisfactory account of knowing: any RA theorist has some explaining to do. Most obviously, anyone who endorses the core claim must ultimately provide an account of ‘ruling out’ and ‘relevance’. And some who‘ve been critical of the whole RA approach have done so because of a scepticism about the prospects of cashing these notions out in a satisfactory way.

Motivating the Relevant Alternatives Approach

The basic idea of conversational contextualism is that knowledge attributions are context sensitive in that a given knowledge attribution may be true if made in one context but false if made in another, owing to differences in the attributors’ conversational contexts. Moreover, the context sensitivity involved is traced back to the context sensitivity of the word “know,” which, in turn, is commonly modelled on the case either of genuine indexicals such as “I” or “here” or of comparative adjectives such as “tall” or “rich.” But contextualism faces various problems. I argue that in order to solve these problems we need to look for another account of the context sensitivity involved in knowledge attributions and I sketch an alternative proposal.

Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions

Citations

Contextualism, Subject‐Sensitive Invariantism, and the Interaction of ‘Knowledge’‐Ascriptions with Modal and Temporal Operators*

Salience and Epistemic Egocentrism: An Empirical Study

Sceptical Paths Enquiry and Doubt from Antiquity to the Present

Motivating the Relevant Alternatives Approach

The semantics of knowledge attributions

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