Stabilizing Knowledge

If epistemic contextualism is correct, then knowledge attributions do not have stable truth‐conditions across different contexts. John Hawthorne, Timothy Williamson, and Patrick Rysiew argue that this unstable picture of knowledge attributions undermines the role that knowledge reports play in storing, retrieving, and transmitting useful information. Contrary to this view, I argue that the truth‐conditions of knowledge attributions are more stable than critics have claimed, and that contextualism is compatible with the role knowledge attributions play in storing, retrieving, and transmitting information across contexts. In particular, I discuss a social dimension of ‘knowledge’ that limits contextual variability. This indicates a new way of characterizing contextualism.