Contextualism and the New Linguistic Turn in Epistemology

Abstract According to the thesis of contextualism in epistemology, many of our knowledge attributions (including self-attributions) are context sensitive. That is, a particular knowledge attribution uttered in one context might be true, while more or less the same attribution, uttered in a context with different epistemic standards, might be false. Typically, one might think of contexts with lower epistemic standards as holding in informal chats in a bar, while higher standards might hold in a court of law or a discussion of skepticism in an epistemology class. This basic idea can be embodied in two apparently distinct formulations.