Epistemic contextualism

Epistemic contextualism is the view that the truth conditions of knowledge attributions vary with conversational context, because contexts set different standards for knowing.

Knowledge attribution: A claim that a person knows, or does not know, a particular proposition. Contextualism locates context sensitivity in claims that attribute knowledge.
Interest-relative invariantism: The view that practical stakes affect whether a subject knows, while knowledge attributions remain context-invariant. It explains bank-case judgments through the subject’s interests rather than conversational standards.
Peter Unger: An American philosopher whose work on skepticism and knowledge influenced later contextualist debates. His arguments helped motivate the problem contextualism seeks to address.
Knowledge: A successful epistemic relation in which a subject knows that a proposition is true. Contextualism concerns the conditions under which this relation may be attributed.
Epistemic standard: A threshold of epistemic support that a person must meet to count as knowing. Conversational context determines how demanding the relevant threshold is.
Relativism about knowledge: The view that knowledge claims can be true or false relative to different contexts of assessment. It places context sensitivity in the assessor’s perspective, unlike contextualism’s focus on attribution.
Stewart Cohen: An American philosopher who developed influential versions of epistemic contextualism. His work gave the position a systematic account of shifting standards.
Epistemology: The branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge, justification, and rational belief. Contextualism is a theory about knowledge and the standards for claiming it.
Sensitive alternative: A possibility that must be ruled out for a person to know a proposition in a given setting. A context can make previously irrelevant skeptical possibilities count against knowledge.
Pragmatic encroachment: The thesis that practical considerations can affect whether a person knows a proposition. It shares contextualism’s attention to practical stakes but locates their effect differently.

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