ABSTRACT
Recent epistemology has seen a turn toward understanding the norms governing various practices in terms of knowledge. Strikingly, such norms have been claimed as a data point both in favor of and against epistemic contextualism. This chapter describes that commitment to knowledge norms does not win the day either for contextualism or for invariantism. It focuses on a different possibility: that contextualism itself might motivate suspicion of knowledge norms. John Hawthorne offers what is effectively an argument for preferring unrelativized knowledge norms to their relativized analogues. Keith DeRose also offers a positive argument for contextualism from knowledge norms. If there is one crucial lesson for the literature on knowledge norms to take heed of, then, it is the need to think sophisticatedly not just about knowledge but also about norms and normativity. Many of the theoretical issues surrounding contextualism about 'knows' find analogues in the literature on modals.
