Abstract

Epistemic contextualism is a thesis about truth conditions of knowledge ascribed to sentences such as “S knows that p” and “S does not know that p”. According to contextualists it is the speaker’s context – the one attributing knowledge – that is pertinent to the truth conditions and truth value of knowledge attributions. Thus, in one context a speaker might say “S knows p” while in another context another he/she might say “S does not know p” without any contradiction involved. Cohen’s version of contextualism takes justification, rather than knowledge, to come in degrees. I shall argue that Cohen’s contextualist theory of justification suffers from several major problems