ABSTRACT
Semantics and pragmatics constitute two areas of study of natural language. The Simple View of the semantics-pragmatics distinction on the content of an uttered sentence holds that a semantic theory explains and identifies what is literally said by an utterance whilst a pragmatic theory explains and determines anything else that gets communicated. If studying the linguistic meaning of expressions is within the purview of semantics, in the case of indexicals it must study how context comes into play in determining their reference. If the intuition is not widely shared, then the likelihood is that no systematicity is to be found in the influence of context that mirrors the linguistic meaning of the quantifier expression and, hence, that the context-sensitivity of the utterance in question is not semantic. Epistemic contextualism claims that "knows" is a context-sensitive expression, whose linguistic meaning involves attributing knowledge to a certain standard and the standard is set by the context in which the knowledge-ascription is made.
