ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Ernest Sosa's influential critique of contextualism, before moving on to Hillary Kornblith's defense of Sosa's position, as well as a related problem posed by Baron Reed. It focuses on the responses offered by Keith DeRose, and Michael Blome-Tillman. One of the most common criticisms of epistemic contextualism is that it provides with a fascinating thesis, but one that is properly construed as a thesis about linguistic entities, not epistemic ones. Traditionally the main motivation behind epistemic contextualism has been its ability to offer novel and persuasive responses to the problem of external world skepticism. The chapter examines a possible solution that emphasizes the role that contextualism and theories of "knowledge" play in metaepistemology. Sosa describes that epistemic contextualism has "considerable plausibility as a thesis in linguistics or in philosophy of language", but suggests that it might "overreach" in its attempt to extend the semantic findings in epistemology.
