Abstract

Invariantist accounts of knowledge attributions force an uncomfortable choice between skepticism, dogmatism, and rejecting closure (the idea that knowledge is preserved by obvious entailments). Contextualist accounts offer a way out of the trilemma, but yield faulty predictions about disagreement, retraction, and truth attributions. This chapter argues that a relativist account can combine the attractive features of contextualism and invariantism, breaking a deadlock in the contemporary debate. It is argued that the subject-sensitive invariantism advocated by Stanley and Hawthorne, which also tries to find a middle course, gets the wrong dimension of variability. Nonindexical contextualist and expressivist accounts are also considered and rejected. Replies are given to objections to the relativist account by Stanley and Montminy.