The Mind-Independence of Contexts for Knowledge Attributions

Abstract

This chapter explores the consequences of taking contexts to be mind-independent. A tension between intentionalist and objectivist conceptions of context is evident already in David Lewis's early, influential contributions to the subject of the context-relativity of knowledge attributions. An approach might have led to conclusions about disagreement similar to those of the objectivist, but since Keith DeRose lacks a general account of what may reasonably determine the content of a context, he ends up favoring a different sort of gap. Jason Stanley's linguistic critique of epistemic contextualism focuses on the strength of justification account. Stanley holds that in the case of genuinely context-relative expressions, such as "every", the contextually determined interpretation can vary with different occurrences of the context-relative expression with a single sentence. It may be clear that between the original assertion and the subsequent retraction there really has been a shift in the pertinent context.

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