ABSTRACT
Recent epistemology pits Invariantists against Contextualists in a debate about how to best account for various features of knowledge claims. One feature is the cross-contextual usefulness of knowledge claims: if a person says she knows p, her knowledge claim can be useful to others, regardless of whether or how these others differ from the speaker in their interests in p’s truth. I argue that a widely shared assumption of both Contextualists and Invariantists hampers the explanation of cross-contextual usefulness, namely the assumption that the standards that govern knowledge claims are personal standards. This widely shared assumption makes it difficult to account for the cross-contextual use of knowledge claims. I suggest we should reject the widely shared “personalist” assumption and explore the nature of impersonal epistemic standards.
