ABSTRACT
This chapter describes that the contextual variation results from pragmatic factors. The everyday cases providing the best evidence for contextualism involve loose use: the speaker means that S is close enough to knowing p for different purposes. Loose use is a common form of implicature related to hyperbole and irony. The loose-use account requires a strong invariant semantics, but not skepticism. Pragmatic accounts of the contextual variation in knowledge claims could be combined with a weaker invariant semantics. Variation in belief is thus another factor accounting for variation in usage. The chapter explains that the epistemology case motivating much contextualist thinking is a paradigm case of belief variation. One problem for the weak invariantist is to provide a reason for believing that the threshold of justification required for knowledge is low enough to make the knowledge affirmations in the bank and parking cases true rather than high enough to make the knowledge denials false.
