ABSTRACT
This chapter evaluates the prospects of stating a persuasive version of disagreement challenge for contextualism and considers some responses to it on behalf of contextualism. The standard motivation for contextualism is that knowledge ascriptions like intuitively have different truth values when uttered in different contexts, holding fixed the facts about the subject's epistemic situation. Contextualism about "knows" is the view that knowledge ascriptions may express different propositions in different contexts of utterance, even when the ascription contains no other context-sensitive vocabulary. Disagreements involving two parties, one of whom makes a knowledge ascription and the other of whom rejects that knowledge ascription, pose a serious challenge to contextualism. David Plunkett and Tim Sundell argue that there are some cases of strong disagreement that are best analyzed as metalinguistic negotiations. Because the speakers engaged in a metalinguistic negotiation may assert compatible propositions, this result immediately challenges The Strong Disagreement Hypothesis.
