ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the nature of Gettier cases. It considers David Lewis's contextualist treatment of Gettier cases. The chapter also considers Stewart Cohen's influential critique of Lewis's approach. It offers a limited defense of contextualist treatment of Barn Facade cases. Epistemic contextualism is the thesis that the word "knows" and its cognates are context-sensitive. Put differently, sentences using the word "knows" and its cognates express different propositions in different conversational contexts. The notable exception is Lewis's "Elusive Knowledge", where he argues that his version of contextualism gives a unified treatment of Gettier cases, the lottery problem, and skepticism. There have been few attempts in the literature to apply contextualist ideas to Gettier cases. Roughly, Gettier cases are possible cases purporting to show that some analysis or definition of knowledge fails to state sufficient conditions for knowledge. Lewis's contextualist account of knowledge ascriptions exploits the well-known context sensitivity of universal quantifiers.
