Epistemic Contextualism: An Idle Hypothesis

Turri, J. (2017). Epistemic contextualism: an idle hypothesis. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 95(1), 141–156.

Epistemic contextualism is one of the most hotly debated topics in contemporary epistemology. Contextualists claim that “know” is a context sensitive verb associated with different evidential standards in different contexts. Contextualists motivate their view based on a set of behavioral claims. In this paper, I show that several of these behavioral claims are false. I also show that contextualist test cases suffer from a critical confound, which derives from people’s tendency to defer to speakers’ statements about their own mental states. My evidence consists in results from several behavioral experiments. I conclude that contextualism is an idle hypothesis and propose some general methodological lessons.