Epistemic contextualism in the style of Lewis (1996) maintains that ascriptions of knowledge to a subject vary in truth with the alternatives that can be eliminated by the subject’s evidence in a context. Schaffer (2004, 2005, 2007, 2008, 2015), Schaffer and Knobe (2012), and Schaffer and Szabo ́ (2014) hold that the question under discussion or QUD always determines these alternatives in a context. This paper shows that the QUD does not perform such a role for "know" and uses this (...) result to draw a few lessons about the metasemantics of context- sensitivity. (shrink)

There are a number of relevant alternatives accounts of knowledge in the literature, including those by contextualists (like Lewis and Cohen), and invariantists (like Dretske). Despite widespread discussion of such views, an explication of the notion of relevance is conspicuously absent from the literature. Without a careful explication of that notion, relevant alternatives accounts resist evaluation. This paper attempts to aid in the evaluation of those accounts, by providing an account of relevance. The account rejects two common presuppositions about the (...) notion of relevance. The account holds that worlds, rather than alternatives, are relevant, and that distant worlds can be relevant. Relevant worlds turn out to be those worlds at which an alternative to one’s belief obtains, and is such that one’s epistemic position (with respect to what one believes at the actual world) is worse than it is at the actual world. (shrink)

Contextualism treats ‘knows’ as an indexical that denotes different epistemic properties in different contexts. Contrastivism treats ‘knows’ as denoting a ternary relation with a slot for a contrast proposition. I will argue that contrastivism resolves the main philosophical problems of contextualism, by employing a better linguistic model. Contextualist insights are best understood by contrastivist theory.