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Contextualism treats knowledge ascriptions as context-indexed: the truth value of 'S knows that P' depends on standards of knowledge relevant in the speaker's context, not the subject's context. Knowledge-denials and knowledge-attributions can both be true when different conversational standards are operative, explaining apparent disagreements about knowledge without relativism.
You know from your work on indexicals that some expressions get their reference fixed by the context of utterance rather than by a fixed meaning. "I" always refers to the speaker; "here" always refers to the location of utterance; "now" always refers to the time of utterance. The expression is constant but its referent shifts with who speaks, where, and when. Indexical contextualism applies exactly this model to knowledge ascriptions: "knows" is treated as a kind of indexical whose semantic content — specifically, the standard of justification it invokes — shifts with the context of the person doing the attributing.
The key move is locating the relevant context in the speaker, not the subject. When someone says "S knows that P," the truth of that statement is determined by the epistemic standards operative in the *speaker's* conversational context, not by the standards S herself is subject to. This is the indexical parallel: just as "I" refers to the speaker rather than to the person being discussed, "knows" picks up standards from the attributor's context rather than from the subject's. Suppose you're in a casual conversation and I say "Hannah knows her car is in the lot." That claim is evaluated against my current context — probably low standards, since nothing is at stake. If a philosopher enters and raises far-fetched possibilities (maybe the car was towed in the last five minutes), the context shifts, the standards rise, and now the very same sentence, spoken by me in this new context, may express a falsehood.
This framework dissolves a puzzling asymmetry in skeptical arguments. The skeptic seems to prove that nobody ever knows anything, which contradicts our ordinary practice of attributing knowledge constantly. The indexical contextualist says: both are right, but in different contexts. The skeptic's arguments succeed in raising the epistemic standards within the philosophical discussion to a level at which ordinary beliefs fail. Outside that discussion, those extreme standards aren't in play. There is no contradiction — just two utterances of "knows" in contexts that fix different standards, the way "I am here" is true when you say it and false when I say it.
What makes this specifically indexical (rather than merely relativist) is that the truth conditions are still objective. The sentence "S knows that P" has a determinate truth value in every context — it is not vague or subjective. What varies is which proposition the sentence expresses. In context C1, "S knows that P" expresses the proposition that S meets standard-1 for P; in context C2 it expresses the proposition that S meets standard-2. Both propositions have fixed truth values. This lets the contextualist preserve the idea that knowledge claims are genuinely true or false — a significant advantage over simpler forms of relativism that make truth context-dependent rather than context-indexed.
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