Do You Think The Contextualist View Is Right?

Contextualism In this essay I will focus on the cases presented by the prompt. Specifically I will explain how a contextualist would make sense of said cases, present and respond to objections or criticism encountered. I will also present my opinion on whether I think the contextualist view would consider the subject of the cases to be right in claiming their knowledge and explain why. To quickly state my thesis, I think that the contextualist view would find the subject of the cases, which I will refer to as myself, to be justified in claiming to know, but I don't think the contextualist view is right. There are objections raised by invariantists, which I will define later, which I believe are strong enough to shake the contextual theory

In Case B, I admit that I might not know whether I turned off the lights. But the content of each case is significantly different. For example, in Case A , me turning off the lights means very little while in Case B it is of greater importance for obvious reasons. There are certain contextual differences between Case A and Case B that need to be taken into consideration. The first is that there is an importance of being right in case B more so than in case A. Me being right in Case A means I will be saving money on the utility bill, me being right in Case B means that my apartment won't burn down. The importance of being right carries a lot of weight in Case B compared to Case A. As Keith DeRose states in Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions ”One might think that requirements for making a knowledge attribution true go up as the stakes go

They may say that in both Case A and Case B, I do know that I have turned off the lights. It is important to note that in Case B, a contextualist would see that my first claim to know is justified, the second claim however, where I contradict myself and admit that I might not know, would be seen as an appropriate claim since a possibility has been raised by my roommate which I could not rule out. Being unable to rule out the possibility, a contextualist would say that my new claim that “perhaps I don't know” is now true. A contextualist position relies on the context of the claims