Narrowing of “Know” as a Contextualist Strategy against Cartesian Sceptical Conclusions

This paper proposes that the free pragmatic enrichment process of narrowing can explain the context-sensitivity of knowledge attribution sentences, which is a central tenet of epistemic contextualism. Epistemic contextualism is a semantic thesis about the truth-conditions of knowledge attribution sentences of the form “S knows that p.”Even though it is a linguistic claim, it is proposed to solve an epistemic problem, i.e., the threat posed by Cartesian-style sceptical arguments. The rough idea behind epistemic contextualism’s solution to the sceptical problem is to argue that the premises of Cartesian-style sceptical arguments (specifically, the first one) generate a context in which the epistemic standards for knowledge attribution are extremely high and impossible to meet, leading to the sceptical conclusion: “S does not know that p”; under those standards, the sceptical conclusion seems to be true. But ordinarily, the negation of the sceptical conclusion (which is the sentence that asserts “S knows that p”) is evaluated as true because the epistemic standards operating in that context are loose.