The Emperor's New 'Knows'

Kent Bach
San Francisco State University

Contextualists claim that a given knowledge-ascribing sentence can express different propositions in different contexts. However, this thesis is not as dramatic as it sounds, for even if it were correct, those propositions would not themselves be context-bound. More importantly, the fact that how strictly we apply 'know' (and many other words) can vary from one context to another does not require a contextualist explanation. That people use words with varying degrees of strictness and looseness does not show that the words themselves have semantic contents that come in various degrees. With 'know' we often attribute knowledge to people who don't have it and often resist attributing it to people who do. Sometimes, because of the stakes, we're extra cautious, and sometimes we're even taken in by seductive skeptical arguments. In contexts where special concerns arise, whether skeptical or practical, what varies is not the truth conditions of knowledge attributions but the knowledge attributions we're prepared to make. It is not the standards for the truth of knowledge attributions that go up but the attributor's threshold of confidence regarding the relevant proposition.