Abstract
Externalism about knowledge commits one to a modest form of contextualism: whether one knows depends (or may depend) on circumstances (context) of which one has no knowledge. Such modest contextualism requires the rejection of the KK Principle (If S knows that P, then S knows that S knows that P) — something most people would want to reject anyway — but it does not require (though it is compatible with) a rejection of closure. Radical contextualism, on the other hand, goes a step farther and relativizes knowledge not just to the circumstances of the knower, but to the circumstances of the person attributing knowledge. I reject this more radical form of contextualism and suggest that it confuses (or that it can, at least, be avoided by carefully distinguishing) the relativity in what S is said to know from the relativity in whether S knows what S is said to know.
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© 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Dretske, F. (2004). Externalism and Modest Contextualism. In: Brendel, E., Jäger, C. (eds) Contextualisms in Epistemology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-3835-6_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/1-4020-3835-6_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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