ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews some of the principal considerations that are taken to critically compare and assess some of the resulting variabilist proposals and recommends a conclusion about the prospects for primitivism. The space of theoretical options includes at least three quite different kinds of proposals. The chapter distinguishes traditional assumptions for each proposal. First, there is the option of maintaining that although knowledge-ascriptions are contentually invariant, the proposition thereby expressed may take different truth-values in different circumstances, depending on variation in the pragmatic factors applying to its subject. Second, there is the option of maintaining that the variability in truth-value of knowledge-ascriptions across the kinds of situation illustrated is actually a product of variation in content. The third option – that of knowledge-relativism, fashioned on the model of assessment-sensitivity as developed by John MacFarlane – shifts the location of the pragmatic factors once again, this time to anyone who evaluates a knowledge-ascription, whether or not they are its original author.
