STEWART COHEN AND THE CONTEXTUALIST THEORY OF JUSTIFICATION

Epistemic contextualism is a thesis about truth conditions of knowledge ascribed to sentences such as 'S knows that p' and 'S does not know that p'. According to contextualists it is the speaker's context - the one attributing knowledge - that is pertinent to the truth conditions and truth value of knowledge attributions. Thus, in one context a speaker might say 'S knows p' while in another context another he/she might say 'S does not know p' without any contradiction involved. Cohen's version of contextualism takes justification, rather than knowledge, to come in degrees. The author argues that Cohen's contextualist theory of justification suffers from several major problems.