Contextualist and Contrastivist Replies to Skeptical Arguments

Epistemic contextualism holds that the word "knows" behaves semantically much like an indexical or context-sensitive expression such as "here" or "tall": the standards that must be met for a knowledge attribution to be true shift with features of the conversational context in which the attribution is made, rather than remaining fixed across every context. The view was developed with particular rigor by Keith DeRose in "Solving the Skeptical Problem" (The Philosophical Review, vol. 104, 1995) and by Stewart Cohen in "How to Be a Fallibilist" (Philosophical Perspectives, 1988), and given an influential formulation by David Lewis in "Elusive Knowledge" (Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 74, 1996), which proposes a "rule of attention": once a possibility of error, such as being a brain in a vat, is explicitly raised and attended to in a conversation, it becomes "relevant" and must be ruled out for a knowledge claim to remain true in that context, even if it was properly ignorable a moment before.