Scepticism and Contextualism. Three Objections and Three Replies

The contextualist anti-sceptical argument seems to be more compelling than many other anti-sceptical strategies, as the refusal of the closure principle preached by Dretske and Nozick or Moore’s common-sensical approach. Yet, it has been maintained that a better response to the sceptic can be expressed by following a neo-Moorean approach. Here we defend the contextualist argument from three objections moved by Pritchard, a leading advocate of neo-Mooreanism. The first objection claims that contextualism would be a «revisionist» linguistic thesis; the second that the contextualist argument «concessive» nature would lead to a sceptical conclusion; the third that the contextualist thesis that ‘know(s)’ is a context-sensitive term would be unnecessary since what the contextualist takes as a change in the truth-conditions of knowledge ascriptions might be better explained as a change in the assertability-conditions of those sentences. In the end, we will maintain that the three objections are ineffective.