Epistemological Contextualism

Contextualist theories of knowledge have received a lot of attention in the contemporary epistemological literature.

The central idea of such theories is that contextual factors play an important role in determining whether a particular knowledge sentence is true or false.

Thus, on contextualist theories of knowledge it might be the case that a particular subject knows a proposition in one context but fails to know that same proposition in another context-while the only thing that has changed is the context. Of the extant contextualist theories of knowledge, attributer contextualism (that is, the type of contextualism that makes the context of the attributer of knowledge crucial in determining whether a subject knows a proposition) has been discussed the most.

The papers in the present collection continue this focus on attributer contextualism, and offer a fairly critical treatment of this theory.

Nevertheless, a number of papers also outline new types of contextualism.

What results is a collection of papers that, though negative towards attributer contextualism, for the most part is sympathetic towards contextualism in general.