ABSTRACT

Disagreement has been receiving attention in the recent debate between contextualists and relativists. A central challenge for contextualism and relativism is to account for the phenomenon of disagreement while still capturing the idea of context-sensitivity. This chapter focuses on the prospects for epistemic contextualism and relativism to account for the intuitions concerning disagreement about knowledge ascriptions. It examines whether contextualist and relativist semantics allow people to model situations of disagreement and certain related phenomena of rejection and retraction. The chapter analyzes the "problem of lost disagreement", which can be considered the largest threat to indexical contextualism. It is argued that this problem can be avoided within nonindexical contextualism and truth-value relativism. However, both relativist and contextualist semantics seem unable to address substantial forms of disagreement about knowledge ascription. The chapter explores that indexical contextualism about knowledge ascriptions faces the problem of lost disagreement and cannot account for certain phenomena of rejection and retraction.