Tim Sundell “contextualism and the Semantic Strategy in Epistemology”

Contextualism in epistemology is the view that on different occasions of utterance, the English verb know expresses different propositional attitudes—attitudes that vary in the required degree or kind of justification. For terminological convenience, I will distinguish between two contextualist theses. First, there is what Iʼll call linguistic contextualism (LC). By linguistic contextualism, I will mean the view that some theoretical implementation or other of the view described above is the correct semantic theory of the word know.1 Second, there is philosophical contextualism (PC) by which Iʼll mean the claim that LC can underwrite a response to cartesian skepticism.2 While the debate about the empirical merits of LC is lively and important, it is not the debate in which I will engage here. I will not, for example, contrast LC with MacFarlaneʼs relativist alternative to LC3, nor with the subject-sensitive invariantisms of Hawthorne4 or Stanley5. Rather, I will be concerned with a worry about PC. That worry is this: Missing the Point: Epistemologists are concerned with the nature and extent of human knowledge. LC may or may not be an accurate claim about the word know. But it is not of interest to the epistemologist. To the extent that any theory is concerned with the specifically linguistic facts, it fails to address the object of study in epistemology. In particular, there is no reason to believe that a theory of the word know, however empirically adequate, could form the basis of a response to skepticism.