Blake Roeber (Northern Illinois University)
"Contextualism and Virtue Perspectivism: How to Preserve Our Intuitions About Knowledge and ‘Knows’"
Contextualism is a linguistic thesis; it is a theory not about knowledge but about the word ‘knows.’ Almost invariably, contextualists defend their position as necessary for preserving our epistemological intuitions in the face of the so-called ‘skeptical paradox.’ In this paper, I undermine the case for contextualism by showing how a properly Chisholmed theory of knowledge might preserve our epistemological intuitions more successfully than the linguistic thesis forwarded by contextualism. My aim is not to demonstrate that contextualism is false. Rather, I aim at orienting the debate away from the preservation of intuitions and toward the linguistic data surrounding the word ‘knows.’