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Epistemic contextualism holds that 'knows' is a context-sensitive term: the truth conditions of knowledge attributions vary with the epistemic standards salient in the context of the attributor, not the subject. In a low-stakes context ('Does Mary know her car is in the lot?'), loose standards apply and she knows. In a high-stakes or philosophically charged context ('Does Mary know she's not being deceived by an evil demon?'), stringent standards apply and she does not know. Contextualism explains why skeptical arguments seem compelling in philosophical discussion yet harmless to ordinary knowledge claims: both can be true — at different standards.
Evaluate contextualism against the 'bank cases' (DeRose): low-stakes and high-stakes scenarios where intuitions about knowledge attribution shift. Ask whether the shift reflects a change in the standards for 'knows' or a change in how careful the subject is being.
From your work on responses to skepticism and the problem of the external world, you are familiar with the pressure skeptical arguments place on ordinary knowledge claims. The skeptic says: you cannot know you have hands because you cannot rule out that you are a brain in a vat. The problem is that this argument seems valid — you really cannot rule out the possibility — yet walking away and denying that you know you have hands seems absurd. You know you have hands. So which is it? Contextualism is a proposal about how both can be true without contradiction.
The key move is to treat "knows" as a context-sensitive expression — like indexicals such as "here," "now," or "I," whose reference shifts with the context of utterance. When I say "I am hungry," the word "I" refers to me; when you say it, "I" refers to you. Both utterances are true, but about different people. Contextualism proposes that "knows" works analogously: the word "knows" picks out different epistemic relations in different conversational contexts because the standards that must be met to count as knowing vary with the context of the attributor. In a normal, low-stakes context, the standards are loose; in a philosophically charged or high-stakes context, they become stringent.
Keith DeRose's bank cases make this vivid. Case One: It is Friday afternoon. You and your partner drive past the bank and you say, "I'll just deposit this check Monday — I was here two weeks ago and it was open on Saturday." She says, "How do you know it's open Saturdays?" You reply, "I know it's open — I was just there." This seems fine. Case Two: Same situation, but you desperately need to deposit the check by Monday morning or a payment will bounce. Your partner asks the same question. Now your reply "I know it's open" seems insufficient — you should check again, call ahead, verify. In the high-stakes context, the standards for knowing have risen, and your belief based on a two-week-old visit no longer meets them. Contextualism says: in Case One, it is true that you know; in Case Two, it is true that you do not know. The same belief, in the same person, is correctly described by both attributions — because the word "knows" tracks different standards in the two contexts.
This explains the skeptical puzzle elegantly. In the philosophy seminar, raising the possibility of a Cartesian evil demon raises the conversational standards to include ruling out that possibility. At those elevated standards, you genuinely do not know you have hands — the knowledge-that-you-have-hands-sentence is false in that context. But when you leave the seminar and go about your day, the conversational context drops back to normal standards, and it becomes true again that you know you have hands. There is no contradiction because the word "knows" is doing different work in the two contexts. Contextualism thus reframes skepticism not as a discovery about the limits of human knowledge but as a reflection of what happens when you raise epistemic standards in conversation.
The main objection is the subject-sensitivity worry: contextualism locates the standard-shift in the *attributor's* context, not the *subject's* situation. This means that whether you know something is partly a function of who is talking about you and in what context, which seems strange. If a friend in a panic says "She doesn't know whether the bridge is safe," this could make it true that you don't know — even though nothing changed in your epistemic situation. Invariantists argue this gets things backwards: what matters is how well the subject is placed to track the truth, not what is being said about her. John Hawthorne's subject-sensitive invariantism and Jeremy Stanley's view that standards are fixed by *practical stakes of the subject* are alternative positions that try to capture the intuitions behind the bank cases while keeping the truth of "knows" fixed by the subject's situation. Contextualism remains one of the most discussed and contested proposals in contemporary epistemology precisely because it takes the variability in our knowledge-talk seriously while raising hard questions about where that variability is located.
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