Defending Contextualist Anti-Luck Epistemology

Mark Heller

Southern Methodist University

In Part I, I defend contextualism against the charge of ad hocery. What is needed is a detailed explanation of how context does the work it is supposed to do. I propose that we find that explanation not in semantic or pragmatic rules, but in human psychology. My claim is that context does the work it does by giving us clues about what the knowledge attributer is trying to accomplish with her utterance, and we use that information to fill in the missing values that remain constant when considering the relevant counterfactual situations. In Part II, I defend reliabilism and relevant alternativism against supposed counterexamples. Some counterexamples, like Bonjour’s clairvoyant, are handled by applying the results of Part I. Others are handled by restricting the basic anti-luck account to foundational knowledge.