Michael Williams and Keith DeRose defend their different versions of contextualism on the grounds that contextualism gives a better account of the ordinary use of epistemic terms than invariantist competitors. One aim of this paper is to explain why their arguments do not succeed. A further aim is to show that the dispute between contextualists and invariantists portrayed by Williams and DeRose is a narrow interpretation of the dispute: there are important contextualist and invariantist positions which fall outside the scope (...) of their arguments and which a full defense of contextualism should consider. (shrink)

External world skeptics argue that we have no knowledge of the external world. Contextualist theories of knowledge attempt to address the skeptical problem by maintaining that arguments for skepticism are effective only in certain contexts in which the standards for knowledge are so high that we cannot reach them. In ordinary contexts, however, the standards for knowledge fall back down to reachable levels and we again are able to have knowledge of the external world. In order to address the objection (...) that contextualists confuse the standards for knowledge with the standards for warranted assertion, Keith DeRose appeals to the knowledge account of warranted assertion to argue that if one is warranted in asserting p, one also knows p. A skeptic, however, can maintain a context-invariant view of the knowledge account of assertion, in which case such an account would not provide my help to contextualism. (shrink)