2010-

There is abundant evidence of contextual variation in the use of “S knows that p.” Contextualist theories explain this variation in terms of semantic hypotheses that refer to the standards of either the subject’s context (Hawthorne and Stanley) or the ascriber’s context (Cohen and DeRose). Extensive linguistic evidence makes both forms untenable. I show that the contextual variation of knowledge claims is better explained by pragmatic factors that operate generally. The variation is due in part to the fact that “S knows that p” is commonly used loosely to implicate “S is close enough to knowing that p for contextually indicated purposes” (Davis 2007) This paper shows that an independent source of contextual variation is differences in belief about what people know. This factor is particularly important in the epistemology and lottery cases.

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