The Limited Insights of Contextualism in the Internalism–Externalism Debate
Abstract
Internalism and externalism disagree about what makes a belief justified, and contextualism is frequently offered as a way to dissolve that disagreement. This paper argues that contextualism cannot do that work. Its central claim is semantic: the standards expressed by "knows" can shift with the conversational context of an attribution. That claim is compatible with either side of the older dispute, so it cannot decide between them. Three limitations are developed. A semantic thesis about "knows" does not entail an epistemological thesis about justification, and the inference between them requires premises that contextualists rarely supply. Contextualism is silent on which standard ought to govern a given evaluation, so the normative question on which the dispute turns is left untouched. And once an assessor's context is held fixed, contextualism must still choose between access and reliability, because a single context cannot assign justification differently to two internally duplicate believers without taking a substantive stand. The third limitation is developed as an original argument, the fixed-context dilemma. The conclusion is that contextualism's contribution is diagnostic rather than constructive. It explains why rival intuitions feel compelling, and that is worth having, but the dispute about justification survives the explanation intact.
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