The status of the knowledge iteration principles in the account provided by Lewis in “Elusive Knowledge” is disputed. By distinguishing carefully between what in the account describes the contribution of the attributor’s context and what describes the contribution of the subject’s situation, we can resolve this dispute in favour of Holliday’s claim that the iteration principles are rendered invalid. However, that is not the end of the story. For Lewis’s account still predicts that counterexamples to the negative iteration principle ) (...) come out as elusive: such counterexamples can occur only in possibilities which the attributors of knowledge are ignoring. This consequence is more defensible than it might look at first sight. (shrink)

While recent discussions of contextualism have mostly focused on other issues, some influential early statements of the view emphasized the possibility of its providing an alternative to both coherentism and traditional versions of foundationalism. In this essay, I will pick up on this strand of contextualist thought, and argue that contextualist versions of foundationalism promise to solve some problems that their non-contextualist cousins cannot. In particular, I will argue that adopting contextualist versions of foundationalism can let us reconcile Bayesian accounts (...) of belief updating with a version of the holist claim that all beliefs are defeasible. (shrink)

In this article I focus on some unduly neglected common-sense considerations supporting the view that one's evidence is the propositions that one knows. I reply to two recent objections to these considerations.