Abstract

Contextualism is shown to avoid certain problems, and to thereby gain an important advantage over subject-sensitive invariantism, by its ability to respect ‘intellectualism’, the thesis that questions concerning whether subjects' true beliefs amount to knowledge turn exclusively on features of those subjects' situations that are truth-relevant, in that they affect how likely it is that the belief is true, and by its related ability to avoid sanctioning very implausible-sounding ‘Now you know it; now you don't’ claims. The ‘fallacy of semantic descent’, by which it is held against a theory that it has a certain implausible implication, when the theory's actual implications are instead higher-level claims, is exposed, to disarm resistance to contextualism based on such confusions.