contextualizing your thesis generally involves

Chapter 4: Writing the Methods Section

Methods Goal 1: Contextualize the Study’s Methods

The first goal of writing your Methods section is to contextualize (provide context or a “picture” of) the procedures you followed to conduct the research. Doing this requires attention to detail. Some of the possible ways that you can accomplish this goal will be discussed later in the chapter, but first, let’s look at some examples of Methods sections from published research articles in high-impact journals (the parts of the Methods that contain Goal 1 language are bolded ):

• Volumetric gas concentrations obtained from the gas analyzers were converted into mass concentrations with the ideal gas law by using the mean reactor room temperature and assuming one atmosphere pressure. Gas release is defined in this article as the process of gas transferring through the liquid manure surface into the free air stream of the reactor headspace. Gas emission is defined as the process of gas emanating from the reactor into the outdoor atmosphere. Gas release does not equal gas emission under transient conditions, although it does under steady-state conditions. The rate of gas emission from a reactor was calculated with equation 1: Equation (1) where QGe is gas emission rate (mass min-1), CGex is exhaust gas concentration (mass L-1), CGin is inlet gas concentration (mass L-1), and Qv is reactor airflow rate (L min-1). The gas release rate was approximated with the rates of change in gas mass in the reactor headspace with equation 2: Equation (2) where QGr is gas release rate (mass min-1), CGh is gas concentration in the headspace (mass L-1), and Vh is headspace air volume (L). In this article, we assumed that CGh was equal to CGex. To use the sampled data obtained in this study, equation 2 was discretized to equation 3: Equation (3) where __delta__t is sampling interval (min), and k is sample number (k = 0, 1, 2, … ). Gas release flux was calculated with equation 4: Equation (4) where qGr is gas release flux (mass m-2 in-1), and A is area of reactor manure surface (m2) . [1]
• The participants were employees of a medium-sized firm in the telecommunications industry. The sampling frame was the list of 3,402 potential users of the new ERP system. We received 2,794 usable responses across all points of measurement, resulting in an effective response rate of just over 82 percent. Our sample comprised 898 women (32 percent). The average age of the participants was 34.7, with a standard deviation of 6.9. All levels of the organizational hierarchy were adequately represented in the sample and were in proportion to the sampling frame. While ideally we would have wanted all potential participants to provide responses in all waves of the data collection, this was particularly difficult given that the study duration was 12 months and had multiple points of measurement. Thus, the final sample of 2,794 was determined after excluding those who did not respond despite follow-ups, those who had left the organization, those who provided incomplete responses, or who did not choose to participate for other reasons. Yet, we note that the response rate was quite high for a longitudinal field study; this was, in large part, due to the strong organizational support for the survey and the employees’ desire to provide reactions and feedback to the new system. Although we did not have any data from the non-respondents, we found that the percentage of women, average age, and percentages of employees in various organizational levels in the sample were consistent with those in the sampling frame. Employees were told that they would be surveyed periodically for a year in order to help manage the new ERP system implementation. Employees were told that the data would also be used as part of a research study and were promised confidentiality, which was strictly maintained . [2]

So, as you can see in the excerpts above, the writers are providing lots of detailed information that contextualizes the study. To contextualize methods means that you explain all of the conditions in which the study occurred. It might be helpful for you to think of answering the questions who, what, when, where, how,  and  why. 

Goal 1, Contextualizing the Study Methods, means that you completely describe the circumstances surrounding the research. There are several strategies you can use to help you successfully achieve this goal in a detailed manner.

Strategies for Methods Communicative Goal 1: Contextualizing the Study Methods

• Referencing previous works 
• Providing general information 
• Identifying the methodological approach
• Describing the setting 
• Introducing the subjects/participants 
• Rationalizing pre-experiment decisions

Methods Goal 1 Strategy: Referencing Previous Works

Referencing previous works is a strategy used to relate your research to the literature. The strategy involves a direct reference to another author or an explicit mention of a study.

Here are two examples taken from published research articles:

• The entire experiment consisted of six situations, and each situation was tested employing one advertisement. The balanced Latin-square method proposed by Edwards (1951) was used to arrange the six experimental situations. To simplify the respondents’ choices with regard to order and sequence, all of the print advertisements tested were appropriately arranged in the experimental design. [3]
• The Eulerian-granular model in ANSYS 12.0 was used to model the interactions between three phases: one gaseous phase and two granular particle phases within a fluidized bed taken from the literature [32] . This model was chosen over the Eulerian-Lagrangian models as it is computationally more efficient with regards to time and memory. [4]

Methods Goal 1 Strategy: Providing General Information

Providing general information allows a writer to give the background that is specific to the methods. This can be theoretical, empirical, informational, or experiential background to the methodology of the study. You can use this strategy to build a bridge for the reader. The bridge should connect your study to other studies that have utilized the same or similar methodology. This strategy also encompasses any preliminary hypotheses or interpretations that you may want to make.

• The animals used during this study were slaughtered in accredited slaughterhouses according to the rules on animal protection defined by French law (Code Rural, articles R214-64 to R214-71, http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr). The Qualvigene program, described in detail elsewhere (Allais et al., 2010), was a collaborative research program involving AI companies, INRA (the French National Institute for Agricultural Research) and the Institut de l’Elevage (Breeding Institute) in France. The program was initiated to study the genetic determinism of beef and meat quality traits (Malafosse et al., 2007). [5]
• This study focused on stemwood when examining alternative woody biomass management regimes for loblolly pine. PTAEDA3.1, developed with data from a wide range of loblolly pine plantations in the southern United States, was used to simulate growth as well as competition and mortality effects and predict yields of various management scenarios (Bullock and Burkhart 2003, Burkhart et al. 2004). [6]

Methods Goal 1 Strategy: Identifying the Methodological Approach

Identifying the methodological approach allows a writer to pinpoint the exact method that was adopted to accomplish the study’s goals. This is a strategy you would use if there was a specific set of procedures for your approach or, in some cases, even a predetermined framework for how to carry out the study. The main purpose of this step is to introduce the methodological approach or experimental design used for the current study to inform the reader of the selected approach, announce credible research practices known in the field, and possibly transition to describing the experimental procedures.

Consider the following examples:

• In both seasons, the experiments were arranged in a complete randomized block design with four replications, using a plot size of 3.45m x 15m each containing 114 plants. Three levels of organic supplementation [0 kgm-2 (S0), 0.35 kgm-2 (S0.35) and 0.70 kgm-2 (S0.70)] were incorporated into the soil 2 days before solarization. [7]
• To address these hypotheses rigorously, we conducted a randomized controlled trial with children clustered within schools. All three interventions were delivered by the same teaching assistant in each school. [8]

Methods Goal 1 Strategy: Describing the Setting

Describing the setting of the study is simply telling the reader about where or under what conditions the study happened. The setting  is all about the place ,  conditions, and  surroundings. In other words, this strategy details the characteristics of the environment in which the research was conducted, which often answers the “where” and “when” questions. Information may include details about the place and temperature; it may also include some temporal (or time-related) descriptors such as the time of the year. It should be noted that this step may overlap with some steps in Goal 2 (which describes the tools used or the experimental procedures conducted), but it remains distinct from them in that describing the setting specifically references the inherent characteristics of the context or environment in which the study took place, and not the characteristics of the materials used to accomplish the experiment or to affect some change in the subject that is being examined. You’ll read more about this in the next chapter.

• The mares were admitted at day 310 of pregnancy, housed in wide straw bedding boxes and fed with hay and concentrates twice a day. [9]
• All three studies were performed  in the eastern half of the SRS in the RCW management area  (US Department of Energy 2005). [10]

Methods Goal 1 Strategy: Introducing the Subjects/Participants

Introducing the subjects or participants in your study helps you to describe the characteristics of your sample. Whether you have human, animal, or inanimate participants or subjects, you will still need to provide the reader with a careful description of them. For a study involving humans, this answers the “who” question. For studies without humans, this often answers the “what” question. It should be noted, however, that not all disciplines have subjects/participants, but when subjects/participants can be identified, this step helps to describe subjects/participants and their original/pre-experimental characteristics, properties, origin, number, composition/construction, etc. The step also details the process by which subjects/participants were recruited/selected.

Below are a couple of examples excerpted from published reports of research with the relevant language in bold to illustrate how the words/phrases work to implement the strategy, which then works to accomplish the goal:

• Participants in this study included 10 TAs enrolled in this French doctoral program. [11]
• The Mexican populations, Chetumal and Tulum ( Mex-1 and Mex-2, respectively) , have large resin-producing glands, while the Venezuelan populations, Tovar and Caracas (Ven-1 and Ven-2, respectively) , have smaller glands. [12]

The Academic Phrasebank website provides a list of sentence starters that would indicate the use of this strategy. Here are a few examples:

Methods Goal 1 Strategy: Rationalizing Pre-Experiment Conditions

Rationalizing pre-experiment conditions  is a way to show the reader how you attained your specific sample or how you decided about the methods you chose prior to actually carrying out the experimental procedures of the study.

• The literature review presented above leads us to formulate our research questions more precisely. First, we ask whether there is a difference in well-being between the unemployed and those currently employed. [13]
• We defined two sub-samples of LAEs split at R = 25.5. The continuum-bright (UV-bright hereafter) sub-sample of 118 LAEs enables a direct comparison with the SED parameters of R less than 25.5 “BX,” star-forming galaxies in the same range of redshift (Steidel et al. 2004). The remaining 98 LAEs are classified as UV-faint. [14]

Keep in mind that the Methods section is very important. Even if readers are skimming a published article, they typically read the methods with careful attention to the details provided. Because Methods sections are often rote narratives of procedures, there are several frequently adopted words or phrases that are standard. The Academic Phrasebank website provides a list of these, which are summarized in the table below:

Overall, there is a lot of example language that you may use to incorporate as you write the Methods section. Using the goals and strategies as a guide, you can choose the words and phrases suggested to ensure that your methods are appropriately detailed and clear.

Key Takeaways

Goal #1 of writing the Methods section is related to Contextualizing the Study’s Methods. There are six possible strategies that you can use to accomplish this goal:

• Referencing previous works and/or
• Providing general information and/or
• Identifying the methodological approach and/or
• Describing the setting and/or
• Introducing the subjects/participants and/or

Remember: You do not need to include all of these strategies — they are simply possibilities for reaching the goal of Contextualizing the Study’s Methods.

• Ni, J. Q., Heber, A. J., Kelly, D. T., & Sutton, A. L. (1998). Mechanism of gas release from liquid swine wastes. In 2001 ASAE Annual Meeting (p. 1). American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers . ↵
• Morris, M. G., & Venkatesh, V. (2010). Job characteristics and job satisfaction: Understanding the role of enterprise resource planning system implementation. Mis Quarterly, 143-161. ↵
• Lin, P. C., & Yang, C. M. (2010). Impact of product pictures and brand names on memory of Chinese metaphorical advertisements. International Journal of Design, 4 (1). ↵
• Armstrong, L. M., Gu, S., & Luo, K. H. (2011). Effects of limestone calcination on the gasification processes in a BFB coal gasifier. Chemical Engineering Journal, 168 (2), 848-860. ↵
• Allais, S., Journaux, L., Levéziel, H., Payet-Duprat, N., Raynaud, P., Hocquette, J. F., ... & Renand, G. (2011). Effects of polymorphisms in the calpastatin and µ-calpain genes on meat tenderness in 3 French beef breeds. Journal of Animal Science, 89 (1), 1-11. ↵
• Guo, Z., Grebner, D., Sun, C., & Grado, S. (2010). Evaluation of Loblolly pine management regimes in Mississippi for biomass supplies: a simulation approach. Southern Journal of Applied Forestry, 34 (2), 65-71. ↵
• Mauromicale, G., Longo, A. M. G., & Monaco, A. L. (2011). The effect of organic supplementation of solarized soil on the quality of tomato fruit. Scientia Horticulturae, 129 (2), 189-196. ↵
• Clarke, P. J., Snowling, M. J., Truelove, E., & Hulme, C. (2010). Ameliorating children’s reading-comprehension difficulties: A randomized controlled trial. Psychological Science, 21( 8), 1106-1116. ↵
• Castagnetti, C., Mariella, J., Serrazanetti, G. P., Grandis, A., Merlo, B., Fabbri, M., & Mari, G. (2007). Evaluation of lung maturity by amniotic fluid analysis in equine neonate. Theriogenology, 67 (9), 1455-1462. ↵
• Goodrick, S. L., Shea, D., & Blake, J. (2010). Estimating fuel consumption for the upper coastal plain of South Carolina. Southern Journal of Applied Forestry, 34 (1), 5-12. ↵
• Mills, N. (2011). Teaching assistants’ self‐efficacy in teaching literature: Sources, personal assessments, and consequences. The Modern Language Journal, 95 (1), 61-80. ↵
• Pélabon, C., Carlson, M. L., Hansen, T. F., Yoccoz, N. G., & Armbruster, W. S. (2004). Consequences of inter‐population crosses on developmental stability and canalization of floral traits in Dalechampia scandens (Euphorbiaceae). Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 17 (1), 19-32. ↵
• Ervasti, H., & Venetoklis, T. (2010). Unemployment and subjective well-being: An empirical test of deprivation theory, incentive paradigm and financial strain approach. Acta Sociologica, 53 (2), 119-139. ↵
• Guaita, L., Acquaviva, V., Padilla, N., Gawiser, E., Bond, N. A., Ciardullo, R., ... & Schawinski, K. (2011). Lyα-emitting galaxies at z= 2.1: Stellar masses, dust, and star formation histories from spectral energy distribution fitting. The Astrophysical Journal, 733 (2), 114. ↵

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Home » Context of the Study – Writing Guide and Examples

Context of the Study – Writing Guide and Examples

Table of Contents

Context of the Study

The context of a study refers to the set of circumstances or background factors that provide a framework for understanding the research question , the methods used, and the findings . It includes the social, cultural, economic, political, and historical factors that shape the study’s purpose and significance, as well as the specific setting in which the research is conducted. The context of a study is important because it helps to clarify the meaning and relevance of the research, and can provide insight into the ways in which the findings might be applied in practice.

Structure of Context of the Study

The structure of the context of the study generally includes several key components that provide the necessary background and framework for the research being conducted. These components typically include:

• Introduction : This section provides an overview of the research problem , the purpose of the study, and the research questions or hypotheses being tested.
• Background and Significance : This section discusses the historical, theoretical, and practical background of the research problem, highlighting why the study is important and relevant to the field.
• Literature Review: This section provides a comprehensive review of the existing literature related to the research problem, highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of previous studies and identifying gaps in the literature.
• Theoretical Framework : This section outlines the theoretical perspective or perspectives that will guide the research and explains how they relate to the research questions or hypotheses.
• Research Design and Methods: This section provides a detailed description of the research design and methods, including the research approach, sampling strategy, data collection methods, and data analysis procedures.
• Ethical Considerations : This section discusses the ethical considerations involved in conducting the research, including the protection of human subjects, informed consent, confidentiality, and potential conflicts of interest.
• Limitations and Delimitations: This section discusses the potential limitations of the study, including any constraints on the research design or methods, as well as the delimitations, or boundaries, of the study.
• Contribution to the Field: This section explains how the study will contribute to the field, highlighting the potential implications and applications of the research findings.

How to Write Context of the study

Here are some steps to write the context of the study:

• Identify the research problem: Start by clearly defining the research problem or question you are investigating. This should be a concise statement that highlights the gap in knowledge or understanding that your research seeks to address.
• Provide background information : Once you have identified the research problem, provide some background information that will help the reader understand the context of the study. This might include a brief history of the topic, relevant statistics or data, or previous research on the subject.
• Explain the significance: Next, explain why the research is significant. This could be because it addresses an important problem or because it contributes to a theoretical or practical understanding of the topic.
• Outline the research objectives : State the specific objectives of the study. This helps to focus the research and provides a clear direction for the study.
• Identify the research approach: Finally, identify the research approach or methodology you will be using. This might include a description of the data collection methods, sample size, or data analysis techniques.

Example of Context of the Study

Here is an example of a context of a study:

Title of the Study: “The Effectiveness of Online Learning in Higher Education”

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many educational institutions to adopt online learning as an alternative to traditional in-person teaching. This study is conducted in the context of the ongoing shift towards online learning in higher education. The study aims to investigate the effectiveness of online learning in terms of student learning outcomes and satisfaction compared to traditional in-person teaching. The study also explores the challenges and opportunities of online learning in higher education, especially in the current pandemic situation. This research is conducted in the United States and involves a sample of undergraduate students enrolled in various universities offering online and in-person courses. The study findings are expected to contribute to the ongoing discussion on the future of higher education and the role of online learning in the post-pandemic era.

Context of the Study in Thesis

The context of the study in a thesis refers to the background, circumstances, and conditions that surround the research problem or topic being investigated. It provides an overview of the broader context within which the study is situated, including the historical, social, economic, and cultural factors that may have influenced the research question or topic.

Context of the Study Example in Thesis

Here is an example of the context of a study in a thesis:

Context of the Study:

The rapid growth of the internet and the increasing popularity of social media have revolutionized the way people communicate, connect, and share information. With the widespread use of social media, there has been a rise in cyberbullying, which is a form of aggression that occurs online. Cyberbullying can have severe consequences for victims, such as depression, anxiety, and even suicide. Thus, there is a need for research that explores the factors that contribute to cyberbullying and the strategies that can be used to prevent or reduce it.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between social media use and cyberbullying among adolescents in the United States. Specifically, the study will examine the following research questions:

• What is the prevalence of cyberbullying among adolescents who use social media?
• What are the factors that contribute to cyberbullying among adolescents who use social media?
• What are the strategies that can be used to prevent or reduce cyberbullying among adolescents who use social media?

The study is significant because it will provide valuable insights into the relationship between social media use and cyberbullying, which can be used to inform policies and programs aimed at preventing or reducing cyberbullying among adolescents. The study will use a mixed-methods approach, including both quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis, to provide a comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon of cyberbullying among adolescents who use social media.

Context of the Study in Research Paper

The context of the study in a research paper refers to the background information that provides a framework for understanding the research problem and its significance. It includes a description of the setting, the research question, the objectives of the study, and the scope of the research.

Context of the Study Example in Research Paper

An example of the context of the study in a research paper might be:

The global pandemic caused by COVID-19 has had a significant impact on the mental health of individuals worldwide. As a result, there has been a growing interest in identifying effective interventions to mitigate the negative effects of the pandemic on mental health. In this study, we aim to explore the impact of a mindfulness-based intervention on the mental health of individuals who have experienced increased stress and anxiety due to the pandemic.

Context of the Study In Research Proposal

The context of a study in a research proposal provides the background and rationale for the proposed research, highlighting the gap or problem that the study aims to address. It also explains why the research is important and relevant to the field of study.

Context of the Study Example In Research Proposal

Here is an example of a context section in a research proposal:

The rise of social media has revolutionized the way people communicate and share information online. As a result, businesses have increasingly turned to social media platforms to promote their products and services, build brand awareness, and engage with customers. However, there is limited research on the effectiveness of social media marketing strategies and the factors that contribute to their success. This research aims to fill this gap by exploring the impact of social media marketing on consumer behavior and identifying the key factors that influence its effectiveness.

Purpose of Context of the Study

The purpose of providing context for a study is to help readers understand the background, scope, and significance of the research being conducted. By contextualizing the study, researchers can provide a clear and concise explanation of the research problem, the research question or hypothesis, and the research design and methodology.

The context of the study includes information about the historical, social, cultural, economic, and political factors that may have influenced the research topic or problem. This information can help readers understand why the research is important, what gaps in knowledge the study seeks to address, and what impact the research may have in the field or in society.

Advantages of Context of the Study

Some advantages of considering the context of a study include:

• Increased validity: Considering the context can help ensure that the study is relevant to the population being studied and that the findings are more representative of the real world. This can increase the validity of the study and help ensure that its conclusions are accurate.
• Enhanced understanding: By examining the context of the study, researchers can gain a deeper understanding of the factors that influence the phenomenon under investigation. This can lead to more nuanced findings and a richer understanding of the topic.
• Improved generalizability: Contextualizing the study can help ensure that the findings are applicable to other settings and populations beyond the specific sample studied. This can improve the generalizability of the study and increase its impact.
• Better interpretation of results: Understanding the context of the study can help researchers interpret their results more accurately and avoid drawing incorrect conclusions. This can help ensure that the study contributes to the body of knowledge in the field and has practical applications.

About the author

Muhammad Hassan

Researcher, Academic Writer, Web developer

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Chapter 9: Towards the Well-Researched Paper

Corroborate, Contrast, Contextualize

When you are searching for sources to help you support your argument, resist the impulse to look only for documents that pertain to your exact subject matter. Sometimes, students will be frustrated because they have searched exact terms, such as “Occupy Wall Street” AND “Facebook,” and have come up with nothing. However, remember that you are creating your own unique argument. Trying to find papers that have made exactly the same argument you want to make will nudge you towards the “patchwork” model and away from the opportunity to put together something new and interesting of your own.

Instead, look for papers on similar subjects or on the broader categories into which your specific discussion fits. Other writers interested in social media and its use in protest movements will have produced papers on the subject. Exploration of this material can be very profitable for you.

You may find material that corroborates yours. If Author A’s paper on some other protest movement’s use of social media has come to conclusions that seem to confirm your own (when you consider both papers in light of the broader subject), you might present some of Author A’s research and compare it closely to your own.

You may find material that contrasts with yours. This material is just as valuable as the corroborating material. Perhaps you can use it to explore the differences between the contexts of the two discussions (is Author B examining a different type of social media or a different variety of protest movement? Did the users approach the social media in a different way? Did the protest movement originate from a different social context or cultural background? Is Author B herself working from assumptions that are fundamentally different from yours, or does Author B’s paper genuinely offer a complication you will have to take into consideration as you revise and refine your thesis?).

You may find material that contextualizes yours. Perhaps Author C has written a paper on the history of protest movements, or on the way communities seem to work online, or on social upheaval and the Internet, or on Occupy Wall Street’s origins and modus operandi. All four of these subjects are relevant to your paper, but they are also broader in scope. It is often very helpful to look at secondary research on the categories to which your primary document belongs. You will, for instance, be able to discuss the Occupy Wall Street Facebook page more knowledgeably if you know something about Occupy Wall Street.

Corroboration, contrast, and contextualization will all give you ways of approaching your subject matter that would remain inaccessible to you if you limited yourself to a close reading. The secondary works you consult will provide factual information you would not otherwise have, as well as analytical ideas that come from perspectives that might not otherwise have occurred to you. You do need to be careful that you are engaging with these works instead of merely replicating them, but we’ll discuss this issue in more detail below.

Our three “c” terms are still rather broad. Let’s break them down a little and look at some more specific types of information you will find in your sources.

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Contextualizing Your Research Project

Producing research involves engaging in a conversation. When presenting your research, it will be important to demonstrate in your exposition, as well as in your bibliography or footnotes, the pieces of scholarly literature that you aim to respond to, synthesize, borrow from, or build upon.

The following are some strategies for finding literature that can give your project some scholarly context.

1. Use People Sources

Ask your advisor or another professor who is familiar with the area in which you're working to recommend an article, book, or book chapter that would be helpful in developing your work. Share your interests with the person you ask to provide some context.

2. Use Published Bibliographies

Published bibliographies, such as   Oxford Bibliographies  (requires login with Purdue Career Account) are great starting points when trying to immerse yourself in a particular body of scholarly literature. Oxford Bibliographies provides annotated bibliographies of the most recent and authoritative scholarship in several subject areas. Purdue has access to six areas: Anthropology, Cinema and Media Studies, Education, Linguistics, Management, and Political Science.

If you find a journal article, book, or book chapter that you find especially interesting or helpful, look at its bibliography and footnotes for promising leads.

3. Strategically Browse Journal Issues

Browse scholarly journals  strategically . Many journals have specific focuses, either with regards to the research area or methodological approach. A journal's website will provide helpful information about that particular journal. Look at the journal's  " Aims and Scope" or "Author Guidelines." Ask your advisor for advice about the journals that could be relevant to your research area(s).

For a list of Global Studies journals, visit the  Global Studies Journals page  on this guide.

4. Use Reference Works--such as Encyclopedias or Handbooks--and their Bibliographies

Specialized reference works dedicated to basic concepts and themes in Global Studies, such as  The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Globalization , contain brief articles that give an overview or introduction to a topic. These articles are usually written by scholars working in the relevant area. The author will often use sources that are commonly cited or referenced. These sources are provided in the bibliography of the article. Bibliographies can thus lead to articles you can use to shape your own research. Articles are also accompanied by a list of suggestions for further reading.

5. Use Citation Searching

Using bibliographies for promising leads is a form of citation searching. But if you find a journal article, book, or book chapter that is especially relevant, you can also find more recent articles or other works that have cited it. The following tools can easily be used for figuring out who else has cited a particular work.

• Google Scholar  - Searches for scholarly materials such as peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from broad areas of research. It includes a variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web. Search the article or book you've found, locate it in the results list and click on "Cited By".
• Scopus  - The largest abstract and citation database of peer-reviewed research literature. With over 19,000 titles from more than 5,000 international publishers, Scopus supports research needs in the scientific, technical, medical, social sciences, and the arts and humanities. Search your article, book, or book chapter and view its record to find the "Cited By" feature.
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While we like to think that every paper and piece of writing is a unique little flower, they all have a general format of beginning, middle, and end. This holds true for academic papers; they require an introduction, body, and conclusion paragraphs. Keep in mind this is not an exact formula, but serves as a means of organization.

Introduction

Your introduction serves the function of introducing your topic, contextualizing your topic, and presenting your main argument in a thesis. It is usually one paragraph, and generally follows the ‘funnel’ effect of the topic: starting broad and becoming narrowed. S tay away from writing cliches like asking rhetorical questions or putting quotes in the introduction paragraph.  While the thesis statement tells the reader what your claim is and how you arrived to it, the introduction paragraph explains why your topic is important. Here’s a typical structure:

Introduction:

Opening Statements: Introduce some facts and background details about your topic.

• Example:  Video games have often been blamed for causing negative behavior in children and teenagers. Critics claim that gaming leads to addiction, aggression, and laziness.

Specific Stateme nts: Connect your background information to your thesis.

• Example:  As gaming continues to play a larger role in modern entertainment, the old stigma is beginning to be debunked. Studies have revealed that video games are not the root of these negative behaviors and actually have many benefits for gamers.

Thesis Statement: State your claim and supporting arguments.

• Example:  Video games have been proven to enhance cognitive, social, and academic skills, and if society accepts this, video games can be further explored for uses beyond entertainment.

Body Paragraphs

Drafting an essay is just a game of organizing information. Each paragraph should discuss a single topic that supports your thesis statement. Paragraph structure can be flexible, but you want to maintain cohesion and make sure you discuss only a single topic per paragraph.

Body Paragraph:

Topic Sentences: Start the paragraph off with a sentence or two that introduces the main idea the paragraph will cover.

• Example:  Although many people believe video games, particularly the violent ones, lead to aggressive behavior, studies reveal quite the opposite to be true.

Evidence: Provide personal examples or researched facts that support the topic sentence.

• Example:   “It turns out that playing games promotes a range of cognitive skills. This is particularly true for shooter video games, many of which are violent in nature” (Granic et al. 68).

Elaborate:  Discuss the evidence’s significance to the paragraph. Provide additional evidence or further discuss the topic until you’ve fully answered how it relates to the thesis statement or helps solve the problem introduced by your claim.

• Example:   A large chunk of society thinks violent video games should be banned, but in reality, they actually can benefit society. While shooting games typically are violent, they don’t have to be if a developer chooses to emphasize the game’s educational potential.

Transition:  Transitions between paragraphs can be the last or first sentence of the current or next paragraph, give the reader a general sense of what’s to come in the next paragraph.

• Example:   Today, even classrooms utilize video games to help develop students’ cognitive skill.

The conclusion reiterates the relevance of your topic, reviews your evidence, and briefly discusses the future of your topic. Avoid adding any new facts or arguments in the conclusion.

Conclusion:

Opening Statements: Begin with a general concluding statement.

• Example:  Our society is one that is constantly changing, and as we change, so should our views.

Review Evidence:  Overview how all of your evidence came together to prove your claim.

• Example:  Gamers aren’t becoming aggressive and lazy as critics claim. Video games, even violent ones, sharpen youth’s intelligence and cognition, and classrooms that use video games as a learning tool see students retain knowledge much easier.

Future Outlook: State your claim and supporting arguments.

• Example:  Video games have more and more chances to impact society for the better, but we’ll never be able to see those impacts if we are held back by unfounded stigmas.
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Crafting Powerful Conclusions: Summarizing Your Research's Significance

In the realm of scholarly writing, the conclusion serves as the final impression you leave on your readers. It's the space where you synthesize the entirety of your research journey and offer a lasting takeaway. Crafting a powerful conclusion goes beyond restating findings; it involves highlighting the significance of your research and providing a sense of closure. Here's how to ensure your conclusion is a compelling reflection of your scholarly endeavor.

Recapitulate Key Findings

In the culmination of your research manuscript, the conclusion acts as a bridge between the comprehensive exploration of your study and the lasting impression you leave on readers. At the forefront of this conclusion is the task of recapitulating the key findings that your research has unearthed.

In this section, you distill the intricate web of data, analysis, and interpretation into a concise summary. Avoid the temptation to reiterate every detail; instead, focus on the pivotal discoveries that drive the narrative of your research. Address each key finding sequentially, providing a succinct overview of the results you have meticulously detailed in the body of your manuscript.

The goal is to offer a snapshot of your research's most significant contributions. By doing so, you help readers recall the core insights without overwhelming them with extensive technicalities. This concise recapitulation also aids in framing the subsequent discussions that delve deeper into the implications of your findings.

To achieve an effective recapitulation:

Prioritize Significance: Select findings that are central to your research question and that have the most substantial impact on advancing knowledge in your field.

Brevity is Key: Present your key findings succinctly. Aim for clarity while avoiding redundancy.

Maintain Accuracy: Ensure that your recapitulation accurately reflects the nuances of your findings. Avoid oversimplification that could misrepresent your research.

Avoid New Information: Resist introducing new data or findings in this section. Stick to the results that have already been discussed in the body of your manuscript.

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Address the research question.

In the realm of scholarly exploration, every research endeavor begins with a question or hypothesis. As you craft the conclusion of your manuscript, it's imperative to revisit this foundational inquiry and reflect on how your research has addressed it.

In this section, you bring your research full circle by evaluating the extent to which your findings have provided insights into the original research question. Start by rephrasing the question and reminding readers of the intellectual journey that led you to this point. Then, proceed to highlight how your study has contributed to the broader understanding of the topic.

Effective strategies for addressing the research question:

Clear Alignment: Emphasize the alignment between your research question and the scope of your study. Explain how your investigation has provided clarity or new dimensions to the initial query.

Answering the Question: Articulate how your findings directly address the research question. Discuss the extent to which your study has provided evidence or insights in response to this question.

Contribution to Knowledge: Elaborate on how your research outcomes have added to the body of knowledge in your field. If your findings confirm, refute, or modify existing theories, discuss these implications.

Limitations and Nuances: Acknowledge any limitations in fully addressing the research question. Reflect on areas where further research is needed to provide a comprehensive understanding.

Conceptual Implications: Consider the conceptual impact of your findings. Do they challenge existing paradigms, expand theoretical frameworks, or propose new avenues of exploration?

Synthesis: In this section, you synthesize the intellectual journey of your research. Summarize how your investigation, data collection, analysis, and interpretation have collectively contributed to addressing the research question.

Emphasize Significance

As your research manuscript nears its conclusion, a crucial aspect to highlight is the significance of your findings. This section provides the opportunity to convey the broader impact and relevance of your research within the academic and practical spheres.

In this segment, you elucidate why your research matters, both within the context of your specific field and beyond. Your goal is to convince readers that your findings have implications that extend beyond the confines of your study.

To effectively emphasize the significance of your research:

Contextual Relevance: Begin by placing your findings within the context of the existing body of knowledge. Highlight gaps or areas that your research addresses and how it contributes to the ongoing discourse.

Addressing a Problem: If your research addresses a specific problem or challenge, underscore how your findings offer solutions or insights that have the potential to create positive change.

Practical Applications: Discuss practical applications of your research. How can your findings be applied in real-world scenarios? Emphasize the potential benefits to industries, communities, or policies.

Contributions to Theory: If your research contributes to theoretical frameworks, discuss how your insights refine or reshape existing theories. Explain how your work advances the understanding of fundamental concepts.

Advancing Knowledge: Highlight how your research contributes to the advancement of knowledge in your field. Articulate how your findings extend beyond the scope of your specific study to impact the broader academic landscape.

Addressing Grand Challenges: If your research aligns with broader societal challenges (e.g., climate change, health disparities), emphasize how your findings align with efforts to address these issues.

Potential Paradigm Shifts: If your research challenges conventional wisdom or opens new avenues of thought, discuss the potential for paradigm shifts and transformative thinking in your field.

Long-Term Implications: Consider the long-term implications of your findings. How might they shape future research directions or influence policy decisions?

Contextualize with Literature

In the final stretch of your research manuscript, the section dedicated to contextualizing your findings with existing literature plays a pivotal role. This segment offers an opportunity to situate your research within the broader academic landscape, showcasing how your contributions align, diverge, or extend previous scholarly work.

Contextualizing your findings with literature involves more than just referencing related studies; it's about weaving your research into the ongoing scholarly conversation. Here's how to effectively achieve this in your conclusion:

Revisit Relevant Studies: Begin by revisiting studies that are closely related to your research. Summarize their key findings and insights, ensuring you accurately represent their contributions.

Highlight Alignments: Identify areas where your findings align with existing literature. Do your results confirm or reinforce previous conclusions? Highlight these agreements to emphasize the validity of your study.

Discuss Departures: If your findings diverge from established theories or studies, discuss these deviations. Are there legitimate reasons for the differences? Analyze potential reasons for the disparities.

Bridge Gaps: Address gaps in the literature that your research helps bridge. Explain how your findings fill in missing pieces or provide a more comprehensive understanding of the topic.

Extend Frameworks: If your research extends or refines theoretical frameworks, explain how your insights contribute to a deeper comprehension of key concepts.

Contrast and Compare: Compare methodologies, scope, and conclusions with studies that share similarities. Highlight where your approach offers fresh perspectives or methodological advancements.

Contextualizing your findings within the existing literature elevates your research from an isolated study to a thread within the fabric of academic inquiry. It demonstrates your awareness of the broader conversation and positions your work as a valuable addition. By carefully navigating this section, you engage in scholarly dialogue, showing how your research both complements and advances the field's collective knowledge.

Highlight Limitations

No research is without its limitations, and acknowledging these constraints is a hallmark of scholarly integrity. In the conclusion of your manuscript, the "Highlight Limitations" section provides an opportunity to openly address the boundaries and potential vulnerabilities of your study.

The purpose of highlighting limitations is not to undermine your research but to provide a balanced perspective. By acknowledging these constraints, you demonstrate a nuanced understanding of the complexities inherent in scientific inquiry. Here's how to effectively address limitations:

Transparency: Approach this section with transparency and honesty. Readers value researchers who openly discuss the challenges they encountered.

Scope and Generalizability: Discuss the scope of your study and its implications for generalizability. Are the findings specific to a certain context, population, or time frame? Explain how these limitations may affect the broader applicability of your results.

Methodological Constraints: Address any methodological limitations that could impact the validity of your findings. Were there constraints in data collection, sample size, or experimental design? Acknowledge how these factors may influence the interpretation of your results.

Data Limitations: If your research relies on specific datasets, discuss the limitations of these data sources. Are there potential biases or gaps in the data that readers should be aware of?

Unanswered Questions: Identify questions that your research could not fully address. These could serve as future research directions or avenues for further exploration.

Impact on Conclusions: Be transparent about how limitations may have impacted your conclusions. Discuss whether these limitations introduce uncertainty or require cautious interpretation of your results.

Mitigation Efforts: If you took steps to mitigate limitations, such as using alternative methodologies or cross-referencing data sources, discuss these efforts and their potential impact.

By highlighting limitations, you demonstrate your commitment to rigorous scholarship and the advancement of knowledge. This section showcases your ability to critically evaluate your research and provides readers with a comprehensive understanding of the context in which your findings should be interpreted. A well-considered discussion of limitations adds depth to your manuscript and contributes to the overall credibility of your work.

Propose Future Directions

As the conclusion of your research manuscript approaches, you have the opportunity to shift your focus from the past to the future. In the "Propose Future Directions" section, you outline potential pathways for research that can build upon and extend the foundation you've laid in your study.

This forward-looking section demonstrates your commitment to the ongoing advancement of knowledge and provides a roadmap for fellow researchers who may be inspired by your work. Here's how to effectively propose future directions:

Research Gaps: Identify gaps in your study that warrant further investigation. Are there unanswered questions or unexplored aspects of the topic that you've encountered during your research?

Unresolved Issues: Highlight any issues or complexities that emerged during your study but were beyond the scope of your research. Suggest how future studies could tackle these challenges.

Methodological Innovations: If your research uncovered methodological limitations, propose innovative approaches that could address these constraints in future research.

Emerging Trends: Discuss emerging trends or developments in your field that could be explored in subsequent studies. How might your findings intersect with these new areas of inquiry?

Application and Impact: Explore potential real-world applications of your research findings. How might your insights be applied in practical contexts, and what impact could they have?

Invoke a Sense of Closure

As you approach the final moments of your research manuscript, it's essential to craft a conclusion that leaves readers with a sense of closure. The "Invoke a Sense of Closure" section provides a satisfying ending to your narrative, encapsulating the journey you've taken them on and leaving a lasting impression.

In this section, you guide readers through the final moments of reflection and synthesis. Your goal is to convey that your research has reached its natural endpoint and that its significance lingers even after the final words. Here's how to effectively invoke a sense of closure:

Summarize Key Points: Begin by summarizing the key findings, insights, and contributions of your study. Provide a concise overview of what readers have learned through your research journey.

Circle Back to the Beginning: Consider revisiting the opening paragraphs of your introduction. Have you fulfilled the promises you made at the outset? Use this opportunity to connect the dots and reflect on the fulfillment of those promises.

Reflect on the Journey: Reflect on the intellectual journey you've taken readers on. Acknowledge the challenges, surprises, and revelations that unfolded as you delved into the research process.

Reiterate Significance: Reiterate the significance of your research in the broader context. Reinforce how your findings contribute to the advancement of knowledge and the understanding of the topic.

Inspire Further Thought: Leave readers with a thought-provoking statement or question that invites further contemplation. Encourage them to continue thinking about the implications of your research.

Connect to Bigger Picture: Situate your study within the grander narrative of the field. How does your work contribute to the ongoing conversation? Emphasize the continuity of scholarly inquiry.

Express Gratitude: If appropriate, express gratitude for the support, resources, and collaborations that made your research possible. Acknowledge the contributions of mentors, peers, and institutions.

Evoke Emotion: Use language that evokes emotion and resonates with readers. A sense of poignancy and reflection can create a lasting impression.

In essence, a well-crafted conclusion serves as the grand finale of your scholarly narrative. By recapping key findings, addressing the research question, emphasizing significance, contextualizing with literature, highlighting limitations, proposing future directions, invoking closure, and conveying enthusiasm, you create a conclusion that resonates and underscores the importance of your research contribution.

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A Literature Research Guide: Contextualize

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Literature Encyclopedias

A good starting place, encyclopedias and "Companions to Literature" can provide general information about an author's life, concerns, & social environment as well as some historical context for their work.

Contextualize

Information about an author's life and times, the society they worked in, and the sources they drew on in their work can all help provide context for understanding and writing about literature.  Please select the options under the Contextualize tab above for resources concerning an author's life, literary history, and historical context.

T. S. Eliot manuscript page from The Waste Land (1922) from Transcriptions: a Digital Humanities Project on the Cultures of Information

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Education research tutorial.

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• Starting Your Research

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Main concepts, search terms.

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It is important to do enough preliminary reading about your topic that you have a basic understanding of the various issues, key concepts, and facts associated with it. There is no substitute for doing some initial investigation of your topic. The more background information you have, the more effectively you will be able to focus the topic.  Based on your focal points and how they relate to each other, you then form a thesis statement for your research.

A thesis statement is usually one or two complete sentences describing the precise question or issue you will discuss in your paper. It can be a debatable point that requires you take a stand and defend your position or a claim that needs explanations and evidences. You need to develop your arguments in response to the How? Why? and What? questions prompted by your thesis statement. The thesis statement, which often appears at the end of the first or second paragraph, should be specific, covering only what you will discuss in your paper.  Remember that your professor is a valuable resource as you attempt to formulate hypotheses and research questions.

For further information, consult the helpful guide, “ Tips and Examples for Writing Thesis Statements " from the Online Writing Lab at Purdue.

Identify the main concepts in your thesis statement. Make a list of related terms and synonyms that best describe the concepts. This strategy will allow you to construct an effective search within databases with controlled vocabulary. For example, if your thesis were "The effects of online courses on academic performance in higher education." you might make a list like this:

Using the appropriate search terms has a direct effect on your search outcome.  After brainstorming for a list of keywords and related terms based on the main concepts of your research topic, consider consulting the following resources for possible search terms:

• Indexes of your textbooks 
• The thesaurus of the ERIC database. ERIC (Education Resources Information Center) is an important education database sponsored by the U. S. Department of Education. Begun in 1966, ERIC continues to provide access to education information for educators, researchers, and others. The ERIC thesaurus is found in the ERIC database, which is available here .   
• Subject headings and descriptors in other library databases  
• Library of Congress Subject Headings. When searching the library catalog at library.ucmo.edu , note the Library of Congress subject headings used to describe your topic.  They function as a thesaurus, allowing you to find the relevant materials about a specific topic with greater precision than keywords. 
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Contextualization

• First Online: 01 March 2019

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• Claudia Schnugg 4  

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Business, Arts and Humanities ((PSBAH))

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Contextualization refers to the creation of a bigger picture that is fundamental to understand why things matter. Placing ideas, words, or events in a context helps to see new aspects and how one specific act or thing is interconnected within technological, social, or cultural settings. Basically, interdisciplinary collaboration helps to provide a rich picture about complex issues, as knowledge from different discipline helps to understand them (Nowotny et al. 2001). It is an important procedure within humanities and social sciences. In history, for example, contextualization is essential to create an understanding of events in a social and historical setting: what influenced paradigm shift, or which social development was the fundament for a rebellious coup (Hall 2017)? At the same time, knowledge about political and social contexts can help to interpret cultural production, like film production (Orban 2013). In academic management theory, understanding the sociocultural context like historical, cultural, social, and political situations helps to understand the development management theories and best practices (Boyacigiller and Adler 1991).

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Schnugg, C. (2019). Contextualization. In: Creating ArtScience Collaboration. Palgrave Studies in Business, Arts and Humanities. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04549-4_3

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Contextualism in Epistemology

Geoffrey Pynn, Northern Illinois University

• Published: 05 October 2016
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In epistemology, contextualism is the view that the truth-conditions of knowledge claims vary with the contexts in which those claims are made. This article surveys the main arguments for contextualism, describes a variety of different approaches to developing the view, and discusses how contextualism has been used to treat the problem of radical skepticism. Many different objections to contextualism have appeared since the view first achieved prominence. This article explores and responds to a range of objections to contextualism, focusing particularly those arising from aspects of the linguistic behavior of the word “know” and its cognates. Finally, several alternatives to contextualism are described, including: traditional invariantism, contextualism’s original opponent; subject-sensitive invariantism, which emerged as a way of accommodating the primary data that motivates contextualism within an invariantist framework; and relativism, a new competitor according to which the truth-conditions of knowledge claims vary not with the context in which they are made, but the context in which they are assessed.

1. Introduction

A knowledge attribution is a claim that someone knows that something is the case. What conditions must be met in order for a knowledge attribution to be true? Over and above true belief, knowledge involves various “epistemic” factors, such as justification, warrant, reliability, and so on. We can refer generically to such factors by saying that knowing involves being in a good epistemic position . But how good is good enough? How good an epistemic position must you occupy in order for it to be true to say that you know something? Contextualists say that the answer varies with the context in which the attribution is made. A knowledge attribution might require one epistemic position when made in a “low standards” context, but a different, stronger epistemic position when made in a “high standards” context. The truth-conditions of knowledge attributions are thus, in a distinctly epistemic sense, context sensitive . What it means to claim that someone knows depends in part upon the context in which the claim is made.

The traditional opponent of the contextualist is the invariantist . Invariantists hold that the truth-conditions of knowledge claims are fixed across contexts. Invariantists differ among themselves about what those truth-conditions are, and in particular about the epistemic position required to know. Skeptical invariantists hold that knowledge is extremely epistemically demanding, while moderate invariantists think it is not so difficult to know things. Subject-sensitive invariantists think that the epistemic position required for knowledge depends on one’s situation. But all invariantists agree that what it means to claim that someone knows something doesn’t vary with the context in which the claim is made. Relativism is a newer competitor to contextualism, and a more radical departure from invariantism than is contextualism itself. According to the relativist, a particular knowledge claim can have different truth-values relative to different contexts of assessment. Even holding fixed the meaning of a knowledge claim and the underlying facts of the matter, the truth-value of the claim is not settled: it may be true for some, but false for others.

The debate about contextualism does not directly concern knowledge itself, though as we’ll see in section 4 , different versions of contextualism reflect different ideas about the nature of knowledge. Contextualism is a theory about knowledge claims, and hence is not a theory of knowledge but a “complement to any theory of knowledge” ( Heller 1999a , 115). Still, as Keith DeRose, a leading contextualist, points out, “it’s important in studying knowledge to discern what it means to say someone knows something” ( DeRose 2009 , 19). Contextualists hold that their view can be used to make progress on a range of epistemological problems, most notably the problem of radical skepticism.

The terms contextualism and invariantism were first used as names for these views about knowledge claims by Unger 1984 . Classic developments include Stine 1976 , Cohen 1988 , DeRose 1995 , Lewis 1996 , and Heller 1999a ; Rysiew 2011a (sec. 1) provides a thorough historical introduction. Early contextualism grew out of the “relevant alternatives” tradition in epistemology associated with Goldman 1976 and Dretske 1981 ; Pryor 2001 and Black 2003 situate contextualism in that framework. The present article provides an opinionated entry point to a number of current discussions concerning contextualism. After discussing the contextualist approach to skepticism (section 2 ), I will survey two key arguments for contextualism (section 3 ), and give an overview of debates among contextualists about how best to understand and develop their view (section 4 ). In the last decade a number of objections to contextualism’s adequacy as a linguistic thesis have emerged. These objections have made many epistemologists wary of endorsing contextualism. However, detailed and persuasive responses are available to each objection. In section 5 , I discuss several of the most prominent issues and show that there is little reason to balk at endorsing contextualism on empirical grounds. I close by considering some alternative accounts of our ordinary knowledge talk (section 6 ).

1.1 Other Contextualisms

“Contextualism” is used as a label for many philosophical views. Three distinct uses are relevant here. First, one can hold that the truth-conditions of any particular class of claims vary with the context of utterance, and thus endorse “contextualism” about such claims of a sort parallel to contextualism about knowledge claims. There are contextualist approaches to the semantics of causal-explanatory claims; modal language (“might,” “must,” “possibly,” “necessarily,” and so on); conditionals; evaluative terms (“good,” “bad”); normative claims involving “ought,” “should,” and so on; predicates of personal taste; and more. The language of epistemic possibility is obviously of central concern to epistemologists, and there are important connections between contextualism about epistemic modals and contextualism about knowledge claims ( DeRose 1991 ; Egan, Hawthorne, and Weatherson 2005 ; Egan and Weatherson 2011 ). Nonetheless while there is overlap between the literature and traditions relevant to contextualism about other terms and the work discussed in this article, once the details of the positions and arguments come into focus, there are few obvious or uncontroversial connections. So the focus here is exclusively on contextualism about knowledge claims.

Second, “contextualism” is used by philosophers of language as a label for the idea that linguistic meaning is deeply context-dependent. Recanati, for example, says that contextualists hold that “only in the context of a speech act does a sentence express a determinate content” ( Recanati 2005 , 171; see also Cappelen and Lepore 2005 (ch. 1) for an influential definition). Those who embrace contextualism in this sense are likely to be friendly to some form of contextualism about knowledge claims, but the converse needn’t hold. One may be a contextualist about knowledge claims while endorsing an austere view about the nature and extent of context-sensitivity in natural language.

Third, “contextualism” has been used by epistemologists for theories that have nothing directly to do with semantics. Most notably, Annis 1976 introduced it as a name for a distinctive view about the nature of epistemic justification. Williams 1991 (191) follows Annis’s use of the term, and in later work characterizes it as “the view that all justification takes place in an informational and dialectical context” ( Williams 2001 , 179). Though the Annis-Williams version of contextualism is not immediately connected with contextualism about knowledge claims, the views are not unrelated; elsewhere Williams says that “the fundamental idea of contextualism is that standards for correctly attributing or claiming knowledge are not fixed but subject to circumstantial variation” ( Williams 2001 , 159).

2. Contextualism and Skepticism

Every major contextualist has developed his or her version of the view with an eye towards relieving perennial skeptical anxieties. Most of the discussion has focused on a particular form of skeptical argument that DeRose 1995 calls the argument from ignorance (AI).

Consider one of the many obvious facts O that it ordinarily seems that you know, for example, that you have hands , and a radical skeptical hypothesis H on which things would seem to you just as they actually do, but O would be false, for example, that you are the victim of a Cartesian evil demon . It is not difficult to get into a frame of mind in which it seems that you don’t really know that H is false. In that state of mind, the following argument will appear troubling:

You don’t know that Not-H.

If you know that O, then you know that Not-H.

So, you don’t know that O.

Given that AI’s premises are compelling, there is pressure to accept its conclusion. But (AI3) is profoundly at odds with our ordinary perspective. If we wish to retain our ordinary perspective, how can we respond?

The defender of our ordinary perspective may deny (AI1), insisting that we do know Not-H. For this response to be satisfying, she needs an explanation for how we know Not-H. When H is well chosen, providing such an explanation is not an easy task. Alternatively, she may deny (AI2), holding that knowing O does not require knowing Not-H. But this response is at odds with independently plausible “closure” principles for knowledge: it seems that when you know P, you can extend your knowledge to include whatever you recognize that P entails. Moreover, the claim that one knows that O but not that Not-H is, in DeRose 1995 ’s phrase, an “abominable conjunction.” If this claim can be true, why does it seem so bizarre?

Contextualism offers a different path of resistance. Contextualists think that serious consideration of radical skeptical possibilities tends to raise the epistemic standards in the context to an extremely high level. Even our mundane beliefs rarely meet such extremely high epistemic standards. So serious consideration of Not-H tends, by the contextualist’s lights, to transform the context into one in which (AI1) expresses a truth. And given (AI2), which contextualists are keen to accept as true with respect to any context (though Heller 1999b provides a contrary view), the troubling conclusion follows. However, given that knowledge claims are context sensitive, the fact that (AI3) is true with respect to a skeptic-friendly context does not imply that it is true with respect to an ordinary context, where the epistemic standards are less demanding. Hence, the fact that AI is sound with respect to skeptic-friendly contexts is consistent with the truth of our ordinary knowledge claims. Cohen, 1986   1988 , 1999 , DeRose 1995 , Heller 1999a , Lewis 1996 , Neta 2004 , and Stine 1976 all offer accounts in this vein.

Unlike straightforward anti-skeptical responses to AI, the contextualist treatment denies neither premise. On the contrary, the contextualist accepts that, as uttered in skeptic-friendly contexts, AI’s premises are often true. The contextualist’s aim is not to defend our ordinary perspective by engaging with skeptics on their own turf. It is rather to limit the force of the skeptic’s challenge, obviating the need to provide such a defense in the first place ( Cohen 1988 , 113-114, 1999, 79–80; DeRose 1995 , 49–50). Once we understand how serious consideration of a skeptical hypothesis affects the truth-conditions of knowledge claims, we can recognize that our ordinary knowledge attributions are not undermined by the skeptic’s conclusion. In addition, the contextualist has a simple explanation for why AI is nonetheless so intuitively compelling: with respect to contexts where it’s considered seriously, its premises and conclusions are all apt to be true.

The contextualist treatment is successful, of course, only if contextualism itself is true; we’ll consider that question in sections 3 , 5 , and 6 . But even if contextualism is true, one may doubt that its attempt to disarm the skeptic is successful.

2.1 Evading Epistemology?

A number of theorists have argued that because of its epistemic neutrality, contextualism is of little relevance to the concerns that have animated discussion of the skeptical problem.

Suppose that knowledge claims are context sensitive and that our ordinary knowledge attributions are true. As Sosa points out, from the fact that people sometimes speak truly when they utter “I know that I have hands,” it does not follow that people ever know that they have hands ( Sosa 2000 , 4). Even if we accept contextualism we may still wonder whether we know that we have hands. Relatedly, Feldman complains that contextualists “make it correct to use the word ‘know,’ but they don’t address the interesting doubts that have been raised about whether we know much” ( Feldman 2001 , 62). Sosa and Feldman both think that the contextualist’s description of the conversational dynamics exploited by AI is plausible. But since contextualism is neutral concerning the question of what we can know, it does not engage with the issue at the heart of the skeptical dialectic.

The objection misses the point of the contextualist response. Given contextualism, the answer to the question “What do we know?” will vary with the epistemic standards in place in the context in which it is asked. Asking whether people know that they have hands without regard to a particular epistemic standard is, for the contextualist, like asking whether it is raining without regard to any particular location. If the question is whether we know anything by extremely high standards, then contextualists generally concede that we don’t. However, recognizing the standards-relative nature of the question removes the sting of that concession. DeRose says, “[O]nce I start to get a clear look at what it would take to ‘know’ according to the skeptic’s absolute standards, I find the distress caused by my failure to meet those standards to be minimal at best—perhaps to be compared with the ‘distress’ produced by the realization that I’m not omnipotent” ( DeRose 2004 ). On the other hand if the question is whether we know anything by ordinary standards, contextualists will insist that AI has done nothing to undermine our conviction that we do.

Yet it is not obvious that the AI-wielding skeptic leaves our ordinary knowledge claims unscathed. Kornblith considers the “full-blooded skeptic” who uses AI-style considerations to argue that “we have no more reason to believe that the world is as we take it to be than that it is altogether different or, indeed, that there is no such world at all” ( Kornblith 2000 , 25). The full-blooded skeptic’s intended target is any knowledge attribution, not just those made in skeptic-friendly contexts. Klein 2000 points out that the closure principle implies that our ordinary knowledge claims are true only if we know by ordinary standards that radical skeptical hypotheses are false. But, Klein’s skeptic argues, we “ cannot have any evidence whatsoever for believing” that such hypotheses are false ( Klein 2000 , 110, emphasis in original). Without an account of how we can know by ordinary standards that radical skeptical hypotheses are false, the contextualist’s reassurances are apt to ring hollow.

Contextualists have offered such accounts. Cohen says that while we lack evidence that we are not bodiless brains in vats, it is “intrinsically rational” to believe that we are not ( Cohen 1988 , 112; Cohen 1999 , 76–77). DeRose thinks, that provided the closest possible worlds where we falsely believe P are “quite distant” from the actual world, we can meet the relatively undemanding standards in place for knowing P in ordinary contexts ( DeRose 1995 , 35). Lewis says that in contexts where the possibility that P is false is “properly ignored,” one can “know P just by presupposing it”; the assumption is that skeptical hypotheses are properly ignored in ordinary contexts ( Lewis 1996 , 561; Stine 1976 ; Heller 1999a ). However plausible these proposals are, they go beyond what Feldman 2001 calls “bare contextualism,” but are substantive epistemological claims. The challenge of full-blooded skepticism shows that while contextualism provides a key element of a solution to the skeptical problem, direct engagement with epistemology is still required for a philosophically satisfying resolution.

2.2 The Contextualist Error Theory

If sound instances of AI do not threaten our ordinary knowledge claims, why do we find them troubling in the first place? Cohen and DeRose suggest that the appearance of trouble arises from a kind of error. On Cohen’s view, by failing “to distinguish between the standards that apply in skeptical contexts, and the standards that apply in everyday contexts,” we are misled “into thinking that certain knowledge ascriptions conflict, when in fact they are compatible” ( Cohen 1999 , 77). DeRose says that “we fail to realize [ … ] that the skeptic’s present denials that we know various things are perfectly compatible with our ordinary claims to know those very propositions” ( DeRose 1999 , sec. 6; 1995 , sec. 14; 2004 , sec. 8).

Schiffer 1996 argues that this “error theory” is implausible: we shouldn’t expect to be “bamboozled by our own words” in the way that it requires. If, because “knows” is context sensitive, knowledge denials made in skeptic-friendly contexts are consistent with knowledge attributions made in ordinary contexts, then we ought to recognize, more or less immediately upon careful reflection, that sound instances of AI leave our ordinary knowledge claims unscathed. Hofweber and Rysiew refine the objection. Hofweber allows that while there is plenty of what he calls “hidden relativity” in language, the contextualist error theory implies that “sameness, difference, and incompatibility of contents” is inaccessible to speakers. But, Hofweber thinks, it is implausible to posit such inaccessibility ( Hofweber 1999 ). Rysiew says that while speakers may be blind to what proposition a sentence literally expresses, they are rarely wrong about what they mean by uttering a sentence. But, he argues, the contextualist error theory requires this second claim ( Rysiew 2001 , 482–485).

Cohen responds that our ignorance of the context-sensitivity of other terms leads to analogous puzzles ( Cohen 1999 , 78–79; 2001, 90–91; 2005, 61). For example, a “flatness skeptic” argues that, owing to the ubiquity of tiny bumps, no actual surfaces are flat ( Unger 1975 , 54–62). The intuitive force of that argument is dissolved once we realize that flatness ascriptions are context sensitive. However, while it is easy to see that flatness denials made in contexts where even tiny bumps are important are compatible with flatness attributions made in ordinary contexts, the puzzle posed by AI is not readily dissolved by accepting that knowledge claims are context-sensitive. Cohen suggests that this difference in the puzzle-dissolving power of the contextualist approach in each case may be due to the fact that knowledge attributions have a “normative force” that flatness ascriptions lack (2005, 62). McKenna 2014 develops a position that makes Cohen’s suggestion more substantive. McKenna says that knowledge attributions have an important normative function; as a result, an ordinary knowledge attribution and the corresponding skeptical denial reflect a conflict that is not ameliorated by their truth-conditional compatibility. Such a residue of non-truth-conditional disagreement may obscure the fact that the truth-conditional content of the skeptic’s claim is consistent with that of our ordinary knowledge attributions.

DeRose says that when ordinary speakers are asked whether the conclusion of a skeptic’s argument contradicts an ordinary knowledge attribution, some will say “yes” and some will say “no” ( DeRose 2006 , 333–334; DeRose 2009 , 177–179). “Apparently,” he observes, “that’s just a tough question.” Given that there is disagreement among ordinary speakers about this issue, some must be mistaken. If the contextualist treatment of AI is independently plausible, then, it is reasonable to regard those who think that skeptical knowledge denials conflict with ordinary knowledge attributions as the ones in error.

Whether or not the contextualist error theory successfully explains why we find AI troubling in the first place, it is distinct from the contextualist treatment of AI itself. The latter is valuable independently of the former. Contextualism implies that compelling knowledge denials made in contexts in which skeptical hypotheses are in play are consistent with ordinary knowledge attributions. Contextualism may neither explain nor alleviate the concerns of an epistemologist who is keen to show that we know by even very demanding standards that there is an external world, but it does tell us that her failure will not undermine our ordinary knowledge claims. Thus contextualism provides a bulwark against the spread of skeptical anxieties, regardless of whether the error-theoretic hypothesis about the root of those anxieties is correct.

3 Arguments for Contextualism

Insofar as contextualism enables us to make progress on solving the skeptical problem, it is worth taking seriously. But contextualism is also independently plausible. As contextualists have argued, our ordinary knowledge talk appears to show that the truth-conditions of knowledge claims vary with the context in which they are made.

3.1 The Argument from Low-High Pairs

At the heart of the case for contextualism are pairs of imagined conversations concerning mundane concerns such as we encounter in everyday life. In one (the Low case), a speaker utters an instance of “S knows that P”; in the other (the High case), a speaker utters the corresponding instance of “S does not know that P.” In Low, it isn’t a matter of much practical significance whether P is true or false, and no unusual error possibilities are salient. In High, the practical stakes are high, and unusual error possibilities are salient. Considered from the perspectives of the conversations in which they are made, the attribution in Low and the denial in High are both natural and intuitively true. Contextualism accommodates and explains the truth of both “surface-contradictory” claims. Invariantism does neither, at least not straightforwardly. Thus Low-High pairs indicate that contextualism provides a better account of our ordinary knowledge talk than does invariantism.

The best-known Low-High pairs are DeRose’s Bank Cases (1992 , 913) and Cohen’s Airport Cases (1999 , 59). DeRose’s more recent Thelma and Louise Cases (2009, 4–5) are designed to repair a dialectical shortcoming of the earlier Bank Cases (section 7.3):

Thelma, Louise, and Lena are co-workers; their colleague John was in his office all day with his the door closed. All three saw John’s hat in the hallway and overheard a conversation whose participants presupposed that John was in his office. On these grounds they believe that John was in, though they did not see him. At the end of the day, Louise and Lena each head home, while Thelma stops at the local tavern to settle a small bet concerning whether John would be in that day. After her tavern-mates pay up, they ask her whether Lena knows that John was in, since she also had a small bet going on the question. Yes, Thelma answers: (L) Lena knows that John was in. Meanwhile, Louise is stopped by the police on her way home. They are investigating a serious crime, and need to verify whether John was at work today. They have no reason to doubt that he was, but need Louise’s testimony. She demurs, describing her evidence and belief that John was in, but pointing out that he may have left his hat on the hook the previous day, and that her co-workers who thought he was in may have been mistaken. After all, she points out, she didn’t actually see him. They follow up by asking whether Lena could testify to John’s whereabouts. No, Louise answers; she didn’t see him either: (H) Lena doesn’t know that John was in.

Considered with respect to the contexts in which they are made, both Thelma’s utterance of (L) and Louise’s utterance of (H) are natural and intuitively true. But their utterances are simultaneous, and concern the same subject (Lena) and the same fact (that John was in). Contextualism accommodates the intuitive truth of both claims, and explains why Thelma’s knowledge attribution and Louise’s knowledge denial are both true. Invariantists cannot regard both as true. Thus contextualism reflects our ordinary knowledge talk better than invariantism does. Prominent non-contextualist strategies for accommodating the data from Low-High pairs will be addressed in sections 6.1 , 6.2 , 6.3 , and 6.4 .

3.2 The Argument from Assertability

One response to the argument from Low-High pairs is to hold that what varies between the cases are not the truth-conditions of the knowledge claims, but their assertability conditions. The epistemic standards for warranted assertion appear to vary with context; this may explain why both claims are natural and intuitively true (this response is related to the invariantist strategy discussed in section 6.2 ).

The warranted assertability response leads to a distinct argument for contextualism ( Hambourger 1987 , DeRose 2002 , DeRose 2009 , ch. 3). What epistemic position warrants assertion? According to a popular account, a speaker’s epistemic position is sufficient for making a warranted assertion of P just in case she knows that P ( Unger 1975 , ch. 6; Williamson 2000 , ch. 11). A contextualist will rephrase the account along the following lines: a speaker’s epistemic position is sufficient for making a warranted assertion of P in context C just in case it would be true in C to attribute knowledge to her that P ( DeRose 2009 , 98–102). Invariantists should not have qualms with the rephrasing, since on their view the relativization to context is superfluous. But given that the epistemic position needed to make a warranted assertion varies with context, the link between assertability and knowledge implies that the epistemic position required for the truth of a knowledge attribution varies with context as well.

Blackson 2004 objects that the argument, even if sound, does not establish contextualism. It establishes rather that the epistemic position required for a subject to truly claim that she knows something can vary with features of the context in which she finds herself. But this variability can also be accommodated by subject-sensitive invariantism (section 6.3 ). DeRose agrees with Blackson’s assessment, but thinks contextualism is superior to subject-sensitive invariantism on independent grounds ( DeRose 2009 , 108).

A number of theorists deny that knowledge is necessary for assertability (e.g., Douven 2006 , Kvanvig 2009 , Lackey 2007 , and Weiner 2005 ); others deny that it is sufficient (e.g., Brown 2010 and Lackey 2011 ). If knowledge and assertability are delinked, the argument is undermined. The claim that the epistemic requirement for warranted assertion varies with context has also been challenged. Turri 2010 proposes that the type of speech act one performs by making an assertoric utterance varies with context; he calls this view speech-act contextualism . Speakers in epistemically demanding contexts do not (merely) assert, but guarantee ; the epistemic requirements for warranted guaranteeing are more stringent.

4. Varieties of Contextualism

Contextualism is a broad tent. In this section, I’ll survey two intra-contextualist debates about how best to develop the view. The first concerns the contents of knowledge claims. What, more specifically, do knowledge claims mean, and how does this meaning fluctuate with the epistemically relevant features of the context of utterance? Contextualists have proposed a wide variety of answers, and the differences among them reflect differences among theories about the nature of knowledge itself. The second concerns the linguistic mechanism that accounts for the context-sensitivity of knowledge claims. Contextualism has traditionally been treated as the view that the proposition expressed by a knowledge sentence varies with the context of utterance: that “know” is an indexical term. But recent authors have proposed different theoretical frameworks for understanding the relationship between the context sensitivity of knowledge claims and the semantics of knowledge sentences.

4.1 Contextualist Truth-Conditions

The dominant framework for contextualist thinking about the contents of knowledge claims has been the relevant alternatives approach to knowledge, on which knowing that P involves being in a position to rule out relevant alternatives to P. If we understand “relevant” to mean “relevant to those attributing knowledge,” then the relevant alternatives approach naturally leads to a version of contextualism:

(RA-C) “S knows that P” is true with respect to C only if S can rule out the alternatives to P relevant in C.

On the RA-C picture, the epistemic standard in a context is understood in terms of the set of alternatives relevant in that context. Such a proposal is at the heart of many classic and more recent contextualist theories, including Stine 1976 , Cohen 1988 , Lewis 1996 , Heller 1999a , Blome-Tillman 2009 , Ichikawa 2011 , and McKenna 2013 . Opinions among these authors vary widely about how to characterize relevance, the relationship between relevance, psychological salience, and practical circumstances, and what it is to “rule out” an alternative.

Another influential approach echoes the theory of knowledge defended by Nozick 1981 , who held that knowledge requires sensitive belief; that is, a belief that would not be held if it were false. DeRose recasts the sensitivity requirement as a “conversational rule” that fixes the epistemic standards governing knowledge attributions in a context. His “Rule of Sensitivity” states that when a speaker attributes knowledge that P to S, the epistemic standards should be set as high as they need to be so that the knowledge attribution is true only if S’s belief that P is sensitive ( DeRose 1995 , sec. 12). DeRose argues that the Rule of Sensitivity underwrites a contextualist treatment of AI superior to various RA-based treatments.

Contextualists of a more “internalist” bent understand the variation in standards in terms of the type or degree of justification, evidence, or reasons a subject must possess. Though originally couched in the RA framework, Cohen’s view is an example of this approach. He says that what varies is “how justified a belief must be” or “how good one’s reasons have to be” ( Cohen 1999 , 59–60; Cohen 1988 , sections IV and V). Neta’s version of contextualism also starts from an internalist picture of knowledge as involving evidential justification, but on Neta’s view, what varies with context are which states count as evidence; the context-sensitivity of knowledge attributions is parasitic on the context-sensitivity of evidence attributions ( Neta 2004 ).

Not all versions of contextualism are best understood in terms of higher and lower standards. On Schaffer’s “contrastivist” theory, knowledge is a three-place relation between a subject, a proposition, and a contrast proposition ( Schaffer 2004a ). For the contrastivist one never knows that P simpliciter ; one always knows that P rather than Q . As a result, the truth-conditions of “binary” knowledge attributions vary with the contrast proposition supplied by context: when Q is the salient contrast to P, an utterance of “S knows that P” is true iff the subject knows P rather than Q; but when R is the salient contrast, an utterance of “S knows that P” is true iff the subject knows P rather than R. For contrastivist contextualists, what shifts are contrasts, not epistemic standards. (Schaffer himself says that contrastivism is a competitor to, rather than a version of, contextualism (2004a, sec. 1), but the view he characterizes as “contextualism” involves a number of commitments inessential to contextualism as understood in the present essay.)

Another family of contextualist theories starts with the idea that knowledge involves causal-explanatory relations. Greco 2010 argues that knowledge is a kind of “success through ability.” This means that a subject’s true belief that P is “creditable” to her intellectual abilities, which implies that her abilities causally explain her success in believing truly. Since causal explanations are context-sensitive, “knowledge attributions inherit the context-sensitivity of causal explanations” ( Greco 2010 , 106). Rieber 1998 says that when a subject knows that P, the fact that P explains why she believes that P. But whether A counts as “the explanation” of B varies with what contrast to B is implicit in the context, and so the claim that one thing explains another is context-sensitive. Thus “the context-dependency of explanation can account for the context-dependency of knowledge” ( Rieber 1998 , 194).

4.2. Contextualism and Knowledge Sentences

Traditional contextualists hold that the proposition expressed by a knowledge sentence varies with the context of utterance. Cohen says that he “construes ‘knowledge’ as an indexical” ( Cohen 1988 , 97), and DeRose encourages thinking of contextualism in terms of Kaplan 1989 ’s distinction between character and content, a central element of his hugely influential theory of indexicals ( DeRose 1999 , 920; 2009 , 3). Indexical terms encode different contents in different contexts of utterance; as a result, sentences containing indexicals express different propositions relative to different contexts of utterance. Following MacFarlane 2009 , I’ll call the proposal that “know” functions semantically like an indexical, indexical contextualism . If the content “know” contributes to the contents of sentences that contain it varies with the context of utterance, then the propositions expressed by those sentences vary as well. This explains why the truth-conditions of knowledge claims vary with context.

There are various ways to develop indexical contextualism. One may treat “know” as what Schiffer 1996 calls an “indexical verb”: on this picture, the semantic content of “know” is simply the knowledge relation salient in the context, just as (for example) the semantic content of “I” is simply the speaker of the context. Instead, indexical contextualists may assign “know” a more complex semantic content with a typically unpronounced element that accounts for its indexicality. For example, “S knows that P” may encode the content that S knows that P according to N , where N denotes the epistemic standard of the context. Kompa 2002 , Brogaard 2008 , and MacFarlane 2009 develop an alternative that Brogaard calls perspectivalism and MacFarlane calls nonindexical contextualism . Suppose that the sentence “Obama was born in Hawaii” encodes the proposition that Obama was born in Hawaii . That proposition is true at the actual world but false at a possible world where Obama was born somewhere else, or never at all: though it contains no indexicals, its truth-value varies with the possible world at which it is being evaluated. Some theorists think that a proposition’s truth-value can also vary with the time of evaluation; for example, that Obama was born in Hawaii may be true at a 2014 circumstance but not true at a 1914 circumstance. Nonindexical contextualists claim that the truth-value of a proposition varies with the epistemic standard at which it’s evaluated. If so, the proposition that Descartes knew that Galileo was condemned may be true at a low epistemic standard but false at a high epistemic standard. Assuming that the epistemic standard relevant to the truth-value of a knowledge claim is that of the context of utterance, nonindexical contextualism implies that the truth-conditions of a knowledge claim may vary with the context of utterance even if “know” is not indexical.

Brogaard and MacFarlane argue that nonindexical contextualism can resist certain influential objections to contextualism discussed later in this article (sections 6.2 and 6.3 ). Non-indexical contextualism bears a strong resemblance to MacFarlane’s influential version of relativism (section 7.4); the primary difference with MacFarlane’s relativism concerns which context sets the epistemic standard relevant to a knowledge claim’s truth-value.

A third approach distinguishes sharply between the contents encoded by knowledge sentences and the propositions asserted by speakers who make knowledge claims. What a speaker asserts by uttering a sentence is not always the content encoded by the uttered sentence with respect to the context of utterance. For example, consider Bach 1994 ’s example of a mother who utters “You’re not going to die” to comfort her son who’s gotten a minor scrape. The proposition encoded by that sentence is true only if her son is immortal, but she has asserted merely that he is not going to die from this scrape . When by uttering s in C a speaker asserts a proposition not encoded by s with respect to C, her assertion is pragmatically enriched ( Recanati 2012 ). Pragmatic contextualism says that the epistemic standards in a context affect how knowledge claims made in that context are pragmatically enriched. Thus, even if the contents of knowledge sentences are invariant, the truth-conditions of knowledge claims vary with the epistemic standards of the context.

Rysiew thinks that the speakers in Low and High “say something true,” not because of what is “ semantically encoded or expressed by the sentence itself ,” but rather because of the “ conceptually and pragmatically enriched proposition[s]” conveyed by their utterances ( Rysiew 2001 , 486, emphasis in original; Rysiew 2007 develops the proposal further). Cappelen 2005 argues that, while instances of “S knows that P” encode an invariant content that is typically false, speakers who utter “S knows that P” typically assert distinct truths. Both Rysiew and Cappelen present themselves as opponents of contextualism, but indexical contextualism is their real target; their views are versions of pragmatic contextualism. Harman 2007 , in a similar vein, treats contextualism as a “theory of primary speaker meaning.” And Stainton 2010 defends what he calls “speech-act contextualism” (not to be confused with Turri’s view of the same name discussed in section 3.2 ) by appeal to the idea that pragmatic factors affect the literal contents of an assertion; Stainton argues that the speech-act contextualist is invulnerable to linguistic objections to indexical contextualism (in particular those discussed in sections 6.1 and 6.2 ). And Pynn 2015 defends a version of pragmatic contextualism on which High context knowledge denials are instances of lexical narrowing.

5. Objections to Contextualism

Since it first appeared on the scene, contextualism has faced an array of objections. The first wave of criticism focused primarily on the adequacy of the contextualist treatment of skeptical arguments (sections 2.2 and 2.3 ). The second wave, which I’ll focus on in this section, targeted contextualism’s plausibility as an empirical linguistic thesis. These objections have led many to become wary of endorsing contextualism. In this section I will familiarize the reader with some of the most prominent such objections, most of which interact with complex issues in the philosophy of language, and put forward a piecemeal argument that the objections are not compelling. Contextualists have responded to each in careful detail, and in each case the objection turns out to depend upon observations or theoretical commitments that contextualists may freely deny. I’ll first discuss in some detail three influential “linguistic” objections to contextualism (sections 5.1 – 5.3 ), briefly describe three more (section 5.4 ), and close with an overview of some recent work on knowledge claims in experimental philosophy (section 5.5 ).

5.1 Gradability

Cohen 1999 defends contextualism in part by appeal to an analogy between “know” and gradable adjectives such as “flat,” “bald,” “rich,” “happy,” and “sad.” Such terms are semantically linked to scales; the degree on the scale specified by a particular use of the term varies with context. Similarly, Cohen suggests, the strength of epistemic position specified by a particular use of “know” varies with context. Stanley presents a number of considerations to undermine the analogy between “know” and gradable terms. For example, unlike gradable terms, “know” does not accept modifiers such as “very” or “really”; nor is it associated with comparative constructions like “happier than.” So, Stanley concludes, we should be “at the very least suspicious” of the claim that “know” is semantically linked to a scale of epistemic position ( Stanley 2004 , 130; Stanley 2005 , ch. 2).

However, Stanley’s view that terms that do not pass his tests for gradability are not linked to scales has been challenged. Halliday 2007 points out that while “sufficiently tall” is both context sensitive and linked to a scale, it fails Stanley’s tests for gradability. Blome-Tillman 2008 says that whether a noise is loud enough to count as a snore varies with context, suggesting a semantic link between “snore” and a scale of loudness. Yet “snore” fails Stanley’s tests as badly as “know” does. Moreover, just as “snore” accepts adverbial modifiers that denote degrees of loudness (e.g., “very / quite / extremelyloudly”), “know” accepts modifiers that denote degrees of epistemic position (e.g., “with very / quite / extremely good evidence / justification”; Ludlow 2005 , 19–21 provides a long list of other such modifiers).

Moreover, as Stanley acknowledges, the thesis that “know” is not semantically linked to a scale of epistemic position is entirely consistent with contextualism; there are other forms of context-sensitivity than those associated with gradability ( Partee 2004 ). The gradability objection is part of Stanley’s “larger inductive argument” against contextualism ( Stanley 2005 , 52). The challenge for the contextualist who accepts the gradability objection is to find another family of context-sensitive terms that can serve as a plausible model for the semantics of “know.” Stanley thinks that other problems indicate that none of the candidates is plausible. As we’ll see in the rest of this section, however, the other linguistic objections to contextualism are less than overwhelming.

Finally, the gradability objection appears to have no force against nonindexical and pragmatic contextualism. Nonindexical contextualists treat the semantics of “know” in a way quite unlike the standard treatment of gradable adjectives. And Stainton argues that, due to pragmatic enrichment, the claims we make using terms that are not gradable can themselves be “subject to degrees” ( Stainton 2010 , 128).

5.2 Indirect Reports

When someone utters a sentence s , you can often report her utterance by saying, “He said that s ”; that is, by using a disquotational indirect speech report . However, when s contains an indexical term like “I,” “here,” and “now,” disquotational reports of utterances of that sentence break down. For example, if Julie uttered “I’m hungry” and you’re not Julie, you can’t report Julie’s utterance by saying, “Julie said that I’m hungry.” Some opponents of contextualism claim that disquotational reports of knowledge sentences are accurate across contexts with different epistemic standards ( Cappelen and Lepore 2005 , ch. 7; Stanley 2005 , ch. 3). Hawthorne makes an analogous claim about disquotational indirect belief reports ( Hawthorne 2004 , 98–111). These observations undermine the analogy between “know” on the one hand and “I,” “here,” and “now” on the other, and so present a challenge for the indexical contextualist.

Proponents of the objection do not generally argue for the claim that the relevant disquotational reports are unproblematic. Cappelen and Lepore, for example, list it among their “reports of [their] own intuitions” ( Cappelen and Lepore 2005 , 94). Not all share the intuition. DeRose, for example, disagrees with Hawthorne that the relevant indirect belief reports are unproblematic ( DeRose 2009 , 162–166; DeRose 2006 ). When we focus on cases like those involving Thelma and Louise, DeRose says, we’ll find that they are “far from being clearly correct” and even, in DeRose’s judgment, “at least somewhat clearly wrong.” Analogous points apply to disquotational speech reports involving “know” as well.

Even if some cross-contextual disquotational reports involving “know” are wholly unproblematic, this is troubling only if all context-sensitive terms lead to breakdowns of disquotational reports in a like manner. But as DeRose 2006 (337–331; DeRose 2009 , 166–174) points out, there are no relevant differences between the behavior of “tall” and “know” in indirect belief reports; Blome-Tillman 2008 (36–38) makes a similar observation about the behavior of “empty” and “flat” in indirect speech reports. Yet “empty,” “flat,” and “tall” are widely held to be context sensitive. Cappelen and Hawthorne 2009 argue that the fact that a term does not block disquotational reports provides little evidence that it is not context sensitive. They suggest that felicitous cross-contextual disquotational reports involving context-sensitive terms often involve “parasitic context-sensitivity”: the values of the context-sensitive terms in the report are “parasitically determined” by the context of the reported utterance ( Cappelen and Hawthorne 2009 , 40–42). If the suggestion is right, then felicitous cross-contextual reports of knowledge claims do not undermine contextualism.

Finally, the objection has no force against forms of contextualism that reject the thesis that “know” functions semantically like an indexical. MacFarlane argues that nonindexical contextualism is immune: since the content of a knowledge sentence is stable across contexts, we should expect disquotational reports of knowledge claims to be accurate across contexts ( MacFarlane 2009 , 239–241). And Stainton suggests that the pragmatic contextualist can resist the objection as well ( Stainton 2010 , 127–128). Pynn 2015 (sec. 5) develops Stainton’s suggestion in detail, showing that the pragmatic contextualist has nothing to fear from the behavior of “know” in disquotational reports.

5.3 Cross-Contextual Judgments

The argument from Low-High pairs assumes that the correct semantic theory of knowledge claims should comport with our intuitions about the truth and falsity of those claims. Unlike invariantism, contextualism respects the judgments of speakers in Low and High cases about the truth-values of the knowledge claims they themselves make. But according to a number of theorists, contextualism does not respect the judgments of ordinary speakers about the truth and falsity of knowledge claims made in contexts other than their own. Consider a knowledge attribution made in a Low context and the corresponding knowledge denial made in a High context. Participants in High will (the objection goes) not only regard their own knowledge denial as true, but also judge the attribution made in Low to be inconsistent with their knowledge denial. Contextualism implies that the attribution and denial are consistent; indeed, that both are true. The alleged failure of contextualism to comport with our cross-contextual judgments about knowledge claims undermines its claim to respect ordinary speaker intuitions.

The primary evidence cited in favor of the objection rests on observations concerning when expressions of disagreement and retraction are natural. For example, consider the following exchange imagined by Williamson:

John: I know that this is a zebra. Mary: How do you know that it isn’t a mule cleverly painted to look like a zebra? John: Hmm, for all I know it is a painted mule. So I was wrong. I don’t know that it is a zebra after all ( Williamson 2005 , 220; see also Richard 2004 ; Stanley 2005 , 52; MacFarlane 2005 , 202–203; Chrisman 2007 , 228–229; Brogaard 2008 , 411).

John’s use of “I was wrong” and “after all” in response to Mary’s question indicate that he disagrees with and intends to retract his earlier attribution.

But cases like Williamson’s only have force against a view that implies that John’s attribution and subsequent denial are consistent. And while contextualists could regard John’s claims as consistent, contextualism does not imply that they are. On the contrary, since contextualists have no wish to erase genuine disputes about knowledge, they have reason to treat John’s claims as inconsistent. The contextualist may deny that Mary’s intervention has shifted the epistemic standard. Montminy points out that unless we know more about the “presuppositions, purposes, intentions, etc. of the conversational participants, it is unclear whether the epistemic standards associated with John’s knowledge attribution are different from those associated with his knowledge denial” ( Montminy 2009a , 642). Rather than shifting the standards, Mary may have made explicit a possibility that John should have been attending to in the first place, or she may have pressed John to consider a possibility he is free to ignore, and so led him astray. Alternatively, the contextualist may accept that Mary’s intervention has shifted the standard but still regard the claims as inconsistent. This is DeRose’s treatment. He gives an account of cases like Williamson’s on which the latter claim conflicts with the former even given a shift in standards; see his discussion of the “assymetrical gap view” of what he calls “one-way disagreements” ( DeRose 2009 , 150–151).

Still, while Williamson’s case needn’t make trouble for the contextualist, she must hold that some “surface-contradictory” pairs of knowledge claims are consistent; this is, after all, the basis on which contextualism is claimed to capture a key feature of our ordinary knowledge talk. But DeRose points out that when we focus on “properly constructed cases”—that is, the sorts of cases best suited to underwrite the argument from Low-High pairs—it is far from obvious that our cross-contextual judgments are at odds with contextualism ( DeRose 2009 , 160–161). Suppose that the police, in their conversation with Louise, played her a tape of Thelma’s knowledge attribution. Provided that Louise is aware of the casual nature of Thelma’s tavern conversation and carefully attending to the contrast with her own very serious situation, it is odd to think that she would say, “I disagree with Thelma; she is wrong.” It would be at least as natural for her to say, “Thelma was only speaking loosely; she wouldn’t say that if she were here right now,” or, “She didn’t mean that Lena knows .” Unless a firm expression of disagreement would be natural, the case provides little grist for the anti-contextualist mill.

Finally, even if there are clear examples of a tension between contextualism and our intuitive cross-contextual judgments, this is hardly a decisive objection. McKenna 2014 argues that the normative function of knowledge claims gives rise to a form of cross-contextual disagreement that can persist even when the relevant claims are both true. Cross-contextual judgments of inconsistency may reflect the “conflicting recommendations” of the speakers in each context. Brogaard 2008 (453–455) argues that given nonindexical contextualism, a High speaker can truly judge that the Low knowledge attribution was false (though see MacFarlane 2014 , 190–192, who argues that while nonindexical contextualism handles the disagreement data better than indexical contextualism, it fails to explain why speakers should be led to retract). Moreover, the tension between invariantism and our intra-contextual judgments is rather more stark than that between contextualism and any judgments of cross-contextual inconsistency: the invariantist must regard one of the speakers (as well as those of us considering her claim) as mistaken about the truth-conditions of a claim she herself makes, and not merely those of a claim made in a distinct context. (Here relativists claim a distinct advantage over both contextualism and invariantism; see section 6.4 .) It is more charitable to speakers to attribute to them an error about the truth-conditions of a claim made in a context they are considering at a distance than it is to attribute to them an error about the truth-conditions of their own claims.

5.4 Other “Linguistic” Objections

A number of other claims to the effect that our linguistic behavior is not as we should expect it to be given contextualism have been discussed in the literature:

Propositional Anaphora . Stanley 2005 , 52–53 says that various uses of the locution “what I said” that should be true given contextualism are infelicitous. Suppose it is raining outside and I say, “It is raining here.” Moments later when I move inside, I can say, “What I said before is true, but it’s not raining here.” Could Louise felicitously say of Thelma, “What she said is true, but Lena doesn’t know that John was in”? It seems not; Stanley claims that this undermines the claim that “know” is context sensitive. Intra-Discourse Switching . Stanley 2005 , 57 says that, for a broad range of context-sensitive terms, “multiple occurrences of that element in a discourse should be able to take on differing values.” For example, one can felicitously say, “That butterfly is large, but that elephant isn’t large” even when the elephant is much larger than the butterfly. Yet felicitous readings of “Sam knows that his car is in the driveway, but he doesn’t know that it hasn’t been stolen” are, according to Stanley, unavailable. Clarification Techniques . Hawthorne 2004 , 104–106 says that, for most context sensitive terms, various clarification techniques are available for elaborating what we meant by using the term when challenged. For example, if I say, “The glass is empty” and you challenge me by pointing out that it has air in it, I can respond by clarifying: “All I was meant was that it was empty of vodka .” But, Hawthorne claims, we have very few such techniques for clarifying what’s meant by a “know”-involving utterance in response to a challenge.

In each case, the contextualist can either dispute the objector’s data or resist the anti-contextualist inference from the data. As an example of the first kind of response, consider Ludlow 2005 ’s catalogue of natural techniques culled from Google searches for clarifying knowledge claims; Ludlow’s many examples stand in prima facie tension with Hawthorne’s observation. As an example of the second kind of response, note that, since “S knows that P” is true only if P is true, the contextualized version of the knowledge norm of assertion (section 3.2 ) implies that a High context speaker should not assert that a Low context knowledge attribution was true. This explains why a Louise can’t felicitously utter, “What Thelma said was true, but Lena doesn’t know that John was in,” even if such an utterance would (as contextualism is held to predict) be true. For a different and contextualist-friendly approach to the data that underwrite the intra-discourse switching objection see DeRose 2008 , sec. 6.

5.5 Experimental Evidence

Recent work in “experimental philosophy” has focused on the attitudes of experimental subjects towards cases like those involved in the argument from Low-High pairs. Some of the results have been taken to undermine the case for contextualism. For example, Schaffer and Knobe, surveying the data, say that “the results suggest that people simply do not have the intuitions they were purported to have” by contextualists and their opponents, suggesting that “the whole contextualism debate was founded on a myth” ( Schaffer and Knobe 2012 , 675). If correct, this observation seriously threatens the argument from Low-High pairs, and the truth of contextualism itself.

However, more recent experimental data supports, rather than undermines, the argument from Low-High pairs. That argument makes an abductive inference to contextualism from a claim about the intuitive truth of knowledge attributions and denials:

(T-T) The knowledge attributions made by speakers in Low context vignettes are natural and intuitively true, and the corresponding knowledge denials made by speakers in High context vignettes are also natural and intuitively true.

Three studies have tested (T-T) directly. Feltz and Zarpentine 2010 presented subjects with Low and High vignettes modeled on Stanley’s versions of the Bank Cases and asked them to agree or disagree that “What [the speaker] said was true.” They found that subjects tended to be neutral; that is, that they tended neither to agree nor disagree. While this result does not help the case for contextualism, it does not clearly undermine it, either ( DeRose 2011 , 91–94). More recent work has been more decisive. Hansen and Chemla “confirmed DeRose’s prediction that speakers would find both ‘I know that p’ in the Low context and ‘I don’t know that p’ in the High context true” ( Hansen and Chemla 2013 , 203). And Buckwalter 2014 also confirmed (T-T) using surveys based on the Bank Cases. Buckwalter concludes that “contextualism has been shown to be compatible with the relevant knowledge behaviors” of ordinary subjects. 1

The bulk of the experimental work on knowledge claims and Low-High pairs concerns the knowledge claims that experimental subjects themselves make concerning those characters. A central interest has been to identify what factors can produce a shift in judgments about whether a character knows. Some argue that manipulation of the perceived stakes of the character’s situation is responsible for the shift ( Pinillos 2012 , Pinillos and Simpson 2014 , and Sripada and Stanley 2012 ), while others maintain that shifts are brought about by the salience of error possibilities ( Buckwalter 2014 , Buckwalter and Schaffer 2013 , May et al. 2010 , and Schaffer and Knobe 2012 ). This debate is relevant to a number of issues of interest to contextualists. For example, it should help guide our understanding of how and why the truth-conditions of knowledge claims shift (section 4.1 ). And while contextualism per se makes no prediction about what factors produce the shift, the outcome of the debate may indirectly impact contextualism’s plausibility. For example, evidence for the stakes hypothesis bolsters the case for subject-sensitive invariantism, an alternative to contextualism (section 6.3 ), and Pinillos 2012 argues that the results of his interesting “evidence-seeking” experiments favor subject-sensitive invariantism over contextualism. So contextualists cannot afford to be insouciant about this growing literature.

6. Alternatives to Contextualism

The traditional competitor to contextualism is invariantism; the primary challenge for the invariantist is to respond to the argument from Low-High pairs. In this section I’ll describe three invariantist strategies for accounting for the Low-High data, and close by discussing the relativist alternative.

6.1 Pragmatic Factors

The invariantist may attempt to explain the variability exhibited in Low-High pairs in terms of the conversational propriety or communicative effects of knowledge claims. An assertion whose content is true may nonetheless be misleading or otherwise improper, while a false assertion may be informative and proper. Invariantists who attempt to explain the divergence in intuitive truth-conditions exhibited in Low-High pairs in such terms offer pragmatic accounts of the data. In the literature such accounts are often referred to as examples of what DeRose 2002 calls a warranted assertability maneuver , or WAM (section 3.2 ). Black 2005 , Brown 2006 , Hazlett 2007 , Pritchard 2010 , Rysiew 2001 , Rysiew 2007 , and Schaffer 2004b are prominent examples.

Some attempt to account for the apparent truth of one of the knowledge claims in a Low-High pair in terms of Grice 1989 ’s notion of conversational implicature . Hazlett, for example, says that since a High context speaker who made a true knowledge attribution would falsely implicate that the subject can eliminate contextually salient error possibilities, High context speakers instead assert false knowledge denials in order to communicate truly that the subject can’t eliminate such possibilities ( Hazlett 2007 , 682–687; Brown 2006 , 419–428 and Black 2005 ). One common objection to implicature-based accounts is that in canonical examples of implicature we seem capable of distinguishing the falsehood that we assert from the truth we thereby implicate, yet the knowledge claims in Low-High pairs seem true, not false but informative.

Rysiew’s proposal relies not on implicature but on “earlier” pragmatic effects such as Recanati 1989 ’s strengthening and Bach 1994 ’s impliciture ( Rysiew 2007 , 641–648, esp. footnote 31; DeRose 2009 , 118–124 responds to Rysiew’s proposal on behalf of the contextualist). The key difference, for our purposes, between these effects and implicature is that they do not depend upon the speaker’s intending to communicate the literal content of the uttered sentence. Rysiew’s finely crafted view is clearly opposed to indexical contextualism, but since he agrees that in one sense “what is said” by speakers who make knowledge attributions varies with epistemically relevant features of the context of utterance, pragmatic contextualists should find it congenial, as well ( Rysiew 2001 , 485–487).

Davis 2007 pursues a different sort of pragmatic strategy. Davis endorses a form of skeptical invariantism, but treats knowledge attributions made in Low contexts as examples of loose use ( Conee 2005 , 52–53 and Fantl and McGrath 2012 also discuss this approach). Loose talk is ubiquitous. When there are only a few grounds of coffee left in the jar, it may be strictly false, but informative and appropriate, to say that there is no coffee left (e.g., when there is not enough coffee left to brew a full pot). Similarly, Davis suggests, in Low contexts “know” is used loosely; the knowledge attribution made in Low is close enough to being true for practical purposes. DeRose 2012 agrees with Davis that loose talk is ubiquitous, but thinks that such talk is often truthful; the standards of precision in a context, on DeRose’s suggestion, are truth-conditionally relevant. Given DeRose’s suggestion, Davis’s proposal yields a version of contextualism, not invariantism.

6.2 Psychological Factors

Focusing on unusual error possibilities or high stakes may lead you to modify your beliefs. Since knowledge requires belief, a subject who has lost her belief that P can truly deny that she knows that P. If a subject in a High context loses her belief that P, she can truly deny that she knows that P, even if her epistemic position is sufficient for knowing P. Bach says that, in a High context, the speaker’s “threshold for (confidently) believing” goes up, so that she “demands more evidence than knowledge requires” before she is willing to believe the relevant proposition ( Bach 2005 , 77). In a series of rich and empirically well-informed papers, Jennifer Nagel develops a sophisticated account along these lines (Nagel, 2008   2010a , 2010b ). Nagel says that subjects in high-stakes situations experience a high “need for closure”; that is, they require more information before forming settled beliefs than do subjects in low-stakes situations ( Nagel 2008 ). She calls the force underlying this phenomenon “epistemic anxiety” ( Nagel 2010a ). Experiencing heightened epistemic anxiety, speakers in High contexts refrain from forming settled beliefs and so truly deny that they know.

One objection to the Bach-Nagel strategy is that we seem able to suppose that the speakers in High contexts have settled beliefs without making their knowledge denials any less natural or intuitively true; indeed, descriptions of High cases can include a stipulation that the speakers do have the relevant belief (though, see Nagel 2008 , 290–293 for doubts about the effectiveness of such stipulations). Additionally, the strategy does not account directly for the intuitive truth of third-person knowledge denials like Louise’s. Since Lena is not part of the conversation with the police, the high stakes haven’t led her to lose her belief. Bach and Nagel both explain third-person High context knowledge denials in terms of an error on the part of the High context speaker. Nagel 2010b argues that due to a bias called “epistemic egoism,” High context speakers project their own epistemic anxiety on to third parties; Bach 2005 , p. 76–77 provides a similar explanation.

Williamson offers a different psychological explanation for High context knowledge denials. He says that when we focus on unusual possibilities of error, we tend to give them undue weight in our judgments about knowledge, and so experience an “illusion of epistemic danger” ( Williamson 2005 , 225–226). High context subjects thus mistakenly judge that their epistemic position is insufficient for knowledge. Following Vogel 1990 and Hawthorne 2004 , Williamson suggests that Kahneman and Tversky’s “availability heuristic” might explain the illusion. Nagel 2010b criticizes Wliiamson’s appeal to the availability heuristic, but the core of his suggestion—that speakers in High contexts are vulnerable to a kind of illusion—may be salvageable. One advantage of Williamson’s proposal over the Bach-Nagel strategy is that it does not require positing a distinct factor to explain the apparent truth of a third-person denial: the illusion of epistemic danger should affect first-person and third-person denials equally. Pynn 2014 criticizes Williamson’s illusion solution but argues that our tacit acceptance of the principle that those who know are in a position to assert leads High context speakers to make a similar error. For another proposal in the Williamsonian vein, see Gerken 2013 ’s discussion of “epistemic focal bias.”

6.3 Subject-Sensitive Invariantism

Traditional invariantists hold that, for any two subjects in the same epistemic position with respect to P, either both subjects are in a position to know that P, or neither are. This reflects a commitment to what Stanley 2005 calls intellectualism about knowledge ( Fantl and McGrath 2009 call the same idea purism ). Anti-intellectualists hold that whether a subject is in a position to know can depend on other aspects of her situation, and in particular on her practical circumstances: for example, when the costs to the subject of being wrong about P are high, a stronger epistemic position is required for her to know that P than when the costs are low. Combining invariantism with anti-intellectualism yields a view known as subject-sensitive invariantism ( Hawthorne 2004 ; Stanley 2005 calls the view interest-relative invariantism ).

Subject-sensitive invariantism fits nicely with the Low-High pairs originally used to motivate contextualism. For example, in DeRose 1992 ’s Bank Cases, the subject in both cases is Keith. In the Low case, Keith claims to know that the bank will be open on Saturday; in the High case, Keith denies that he knows that the bank will be open on Saturday. Subject-sensitive invariantists can respect the truth of both claims: the practical difference between Keith’s situation in Low and his situation in High means that Keith’s epistemic position is sufficient to know in the former but not in the latter.

However, subject-sensitive invariantism does not explain the Low-High pair discussed in section 2.1 , since Lena’s practical situation is the same with respect to both cases. Subject-sensitive invariantists appeal to strategies like those discussed in 6.1 or 6.2 to explain third-person cases like those involving Lena. Stanley, for example, proposes that, in considering whether Lena knows, Louise is actually concerned with whether Lena would know if she were in her own (i.e., Louise’s) practical situation. And by the subject-sensitive invariantist’s lights, Lena wouldn’t know if she were in Louise’s situation; according to Stanley this provides “a perfectly intuitive explanation of the intuitions” about Louise’s knowledge denial ( Stanley 2005 , 102; Fantl and McGrath 2009 , 56 suggest a similar explanation).

While subject-sensitive invariantism is a competitor to contextualism, the debate about intellectualism is orthogonal to the debate about contextualism. Anti-intellectualist contextualism is a coherent position ( Fantl and McGrath 2009 , 34–37). Nonetheless contextualists are generally intellectualists, and treat their ability to account for the sensitivity of knowledge attributions to practical concerns without rejecting intellectualism as an advantage of their view ( DeRose 2009 , 185–193).

6.4 Relativism

We can distinguish the context in which a claim is made from the context in which the claim is assessed for truth or falsity. Relativists think that a claim’s truth-value can vary with the context in which it is assessed. Applied to knowledge attributions, relativism is usually understood to be the view that a given knowledge claim may be true relative to a context of assessment with a low epistemic standard, but false relative to a context of assessment with a high epistemic standard ( Richard 2004 , MacFarlane 2005 , MacFarlane 2014 , ch. 8; Rysiew 2011b provides a helpful overview of the relationship between contextualism and relativism). Relativists can readily accommodate the data from Low-High pairs: relative to a context of assessment with a low standard, Thelma’s knowledge attribution is true and Louise’s denial is false, whereas relative to a context of assessment with a high standard, Louise’s knowledge denial is true and Thelma’s knowledge attribution false.

Given relativism, an assessor in the High context should regard the attribution made in the Low context as false, since that attribution is false relative to the high standard in her context of assessment. For this reason, relativism’s proponents claim that it outperforms contextualism on the issues concerning disagreement and retraction canvassed in section 5.3 ( MacFarlane 2005 , 219; MacFarlane 2014 , 188). As we saw in that section, however, the disagreement and retraction data do not underwrite a straightforward challenge to contextualism. But even if they do, relativism does not clearly fit those data much better. Consider Williamson’s case again. The relativist’s advantage over the contextualist is that she can respect John’s subsequent judgment that his earlier claim was false, and inconsistent with his knowledge denial. (As we saw, the contextualist can respect this judgment as well, but it takes some footwork; for the relativist John’s judgment of falsity is true simply in virtue of relativism itself.) Yet John’s attitude towards his earlier judgment is not merely that it had a false content, but that it was the result of an error. It would be natural for him to retract by saying, “I was mistaken—I shouldn’t have said that I knew.” But the relativist’s advantage over the invariantist consists in her holding that John’s initial attribution and subsequent denial exhibit “joint reflexive accuracy”: each is true as assessed from its context of utterance ( MacFarlane 2014 , 130). And John seems quite unprepared to accept that his earlier claim was true as assessed from any context. If the semantics of knowledge claims are relativistic, John seems not even to be tacitly aware that this is the case.

In a related vein, Montminy 2009b argues that the relativist must impute to ordinary speakers a kind of semantic error in their cross-contextual judgments not unlike that which contextualists are often thought by their opponents to require. MacFarlane 2014 (196–200) responds to Montminy’s argument. Stanley 2005 , ch. 7 presents a number of theoretical objections to MacFarlane’s relativism, and Cappelen and Hawthorne 2009 give a more general critique of relativism in semantics. On the other side, MacFarlane 2014 develops a wide-ranging and finely honed case for the relativist program, offering detailed responses to many criticisms and application to a number of specific bits of language, including knowledge claims. Relativism is an important emerging paradigm in philosophical semantics, and future work may reveal distinctive advantages over the more well-entrenched contextualist and invariantist alternatives.

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Buckwalter 2010 presents evidence against (T-F):

(T-F) The knowledge attributions made by speakers in Low context vignettes are intuitively true, and the corresponding knowledge attributions made by speakers in High context vignettes are intuitively false.

There, Buckwalter found that knowledge attributions made by High context speakers were likely to be regarded by experimental subjects as true. The result is replicated in Buckwalter 2014 . One might think that trouble for (T-F) is also trouble for (T-T): if subjects regard High context knowledge denials as true, shouldn’t they regard High context knowledge attributions as false? No, because of what Lewis called the ‘rule of accommodation’: that we should, so far as is possible, interpret speakers in such a way that their assertions are true ( DeRose 2011 , 88).

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Understanding the Process of Contextualization

The literature on culture and education points to the importance of using students’ cultural knowledge in the teaching and learning process. While the theory of culturally relevant education has expanded in the last several decades, the practical implementation continues to lag far behind. This disparity points to the lack of tools and other resources available to assist teachers with implementation. By examining the practice of six teachers who scored high on a rubric measuring Contextualization, this pedagogical strategy was articulated into a three-step process. The findings indicate that the role of the teacher in guiding students through tasks that require cognitive processing has been missing from our understanding of this strategy. This study advances the practice of using culture in teaching by operationalizing how to use students’ cultural experiences to make academic connections.

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Series: Practical guidance to qualitative research. Part 2: Context, research questions and designs

Irene korstjens.

a Faculty of Health Care, Research Centre for Midwifery Science, Zuyd University of Applied Sciences, Maastricht, The Netherlands;

Albine Moser

b Faculty of Health Care, Research Centre Autonomy and Participation of Chronically Ill People, Zuyd University of Applied Sciences, Heerlen, The Netherlands;

c Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences, Department of Family Medicine, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands

In the course of our supervisory work over the years, we have noticed that qualitative research tends to evoke a lot of questions and worries, so-called frequently asked questions (FAQs). This series of four articles intends to provide novice researchers with practical guidance for conducting high-quality qualitative research in primary care. By ‘novice’ we mean Master’s students and junior researchers, as well as experienced quantitative researchers who are engaging in qualitative research for the first time. This series addresses their questions and provides researchers, readers, reviewers and editors with references to criteria and tools for judging the quality of qualitative research papers. This second article addresses FAQs about context, research questions and designs. Qualitative research takes into account the natural contexts in which individuals or groups function to provide an in-depth understanding of real-world problems. The research questions are generally broad and open to unexpected findings. The choice of a qualitative design primarily depends on the nature of the research problem, the research question(s) and the scientific knowledge one seeks. Ethnography, phenomenology and grounded theory are considered to represent the ‘big three’ qualitative approaches. Theory guides the researcher through the research process by providing a ‘lens’ to look at the phenomenon under study. Since qualitative researchers and the participants of their studies interact in a social process, researchers influence the research process. The first article described the key features of qualitative research, the third article will focus on sampling, data collection and analysis, while the last article focuses on trustworthiness and publishing.

Key points on context, research questions and designs

• Research questions are generally, broad and open to unexpected findings, and depending on the research process might change to some extent.
• The SPIDER tool is more suited than PICO for searching for qualitative studies in the literature, and can support the process of formulating research questions for original studies.
• The choice of a qualitative design primarily depends on the nature of the research problem, the research question, and the scientific knowledge one seeks.
• Theory guides the researcher through the research process by providing a ‘lens’ to look at the phenomenon under study.
• Since qualitative researchers and the participants interact in a social process, the researcher influences the research process.

Introduction

In an introductory paper [ 1 ], we have described the key features of qualitative research. The current article addresses frequently asked questions about context, research questions and design of qualitative research.

Why is context important?

Qualitative research takes into account the natural contexts in which individuals or groups function, as its aim is to provide an in-depth understanding of real-world problems [ 2 ]. In contrast to quantitative research, generalizability is not a guiding principle. According to most qualitative researchers, the ‘reality’ we perceive is constructed by our social, cultural, historical and individual contexts. Therefore, you look for variety in people to describe, explore or explain phenomena in real-world contexts. Influence from the researcher on the context is inevitable. However, by striving to minimalize your interfering with people’s natural settings, you can get a ‘behind the scenes’ picture of how people feel or what other forces are at work, which may not be discovered in a quantitative investigation. Understanding what practitioners and patients think, feel or do in their natural context, can make clinical practice and evidence-based interventions more effective, efficient, equitable and humane. For example, despite their awareness of widespread family violence, general practitioners (GPs) seem to be hesitant to ask about intimate partner violence. By applying a qualitative research approach, you might explore how and why practitioners act this way. You need to understand their context to be able to interact effectively with them, to analyse the data, and report your findings. You might consider the characteristics of practitioners and patients, such as their age, marital status, education, health condition, physical environment or social circumstances, and how and where you conduct your observations, interviews and group discussions. By giving your readers a ‘thick description’ of the participants’ contexts you render their behaviour, experiences, perceptions and feelings meaningful. Moreover, you enable your readers to consider whether and how the findings of your study can be transferred to their contexts.

Research questions

Why should the research question be broad and open.

To enable a thorough in-depth description, exploration or explanation of the phenomenon under study, in general, research questions need to be broad and open to unexpected findings. Within more in-depth research, for example, during building theory in a grounded theory design, the research question might be more focused. Where quantitative research asks: ‘how many, how much, and how often?’ qualitative research would ask: ‘what?’ and even more ‘how, and why?’ Depending on the research process, you might feel a need for fine-tuning or additional questions. This is common in qualitative research as it works with ‘emerging design,’ which means that it is not possible to plan the research in detail at the start, as the researchers have to be responsive to what they find as the research proceeds. This flexibility within the design is seen as a strength in qualitative research but only within an overall coherent methodology.

What kind of literature would I search for when preparing a qualitative study?

You would search for literature that can provide you with insights into the current state of knowledge and the knowledge gap that your study might address ( Box 1 ). You might look for original quantitative, mixed-method and qualitative studies, or reviews such as quantitative meta-analyses or qualitative meta-syntheses. These findings would give you a picture of the empirical knowledge gap and the qualitative research questions that might lead to relevant and new insights and useful theories, models or concepts for studying your topic. When little knowledge is available, a qualitative study can be a useful starting point for subsequent studies. If in preparing your qualitative study, you cannot find sufficient literature about your topic, you might turn to proxy literature to explore the landscape around your topic. For example, when you are one of the very first researchers to study shared decision-making or health literacy in maternity care for disadvantaged parents-to-be, you might search for existing literature on these topics in other healthcare settings, such as general practice.

Searching the literature for qualitative studies: the SPIDER tool. Based on Cooke et al. [ 3 ].

Why do qualitative researchers prefer SPIDER to PICO?

The SPIDER tool (sample-phenomenon of interest-design-evaluation-research type) ( Box 1 ) is one of the available tools for qualitative literature searches [ 3 ]. It has been specifically developed for qualitative evidence synthesis, making it more suitable than PICO (population-intervention-comparison-outcome) in searching for qualitative studies that focus on understanding real-life experiences and processes of a variety of participants. PICO is primarily a tool for collecting evidence from published quantitative research on prognoses, diagnoses and therapies. Quantitative studies mostly use larger samples, comparing intervention and control groups, focusing on quantification of predefined outcomes at group level that can be generalized to larger populations. In contrast, qualitative research studies smaller samples in greater depth; it strives to minimalize manipulating their natural settings and is open to rich and unexpected findings. To suit this approach, the SPIDER tool was developed by adapting the PICO tool. Although these tools are meant for searching the literature, they can also be helpful in formulating research questions for original studies. Using SPIDER might support you in formulating a broad and open qualitative research question.

An example of an SPIDER-type question for a qualitative study using interviews is: ‘What are young parents’ experiences of attending antenatal education?’ The abstract and introduction of a manuscript might contain this broad and open research question, after which the methods section provides further operationalization of the elements of the SPIDER tool, such as (S) young mothers and fathers, aged 17–27 years, 1–12 months after childbirth, low to high educational levels, in urban or semi-urban regions; (PI) experiences of antenatal education in group sessions during pregnancy guided by maternity care professionals; (D) phenomenology, interviews; (E) perceived benefits and costs, psychosocial and peer support received, changes in attitude, expectations, and perceived skills regarding healthy lifestyle, childbirth, parenthood, etc.; and (R) qualitative.

Is it normal that my research question seems to change during the study?

During the research process, the research question might change to a certain degree because data collection and analysis sharpens the researcher’s lenses. Data collection and analysis are iterative processes that happen simultaneously as the research progresses. This might lead to a somewhat different focus of your research question and to additional questions. However, you cannot radically change your research question because that would mean you were performing a different study. In the methods section, you need to describe how and explain why the original research question was changed.

For example, let us return to the problem that GPs are hesitant to ask about intimate partner violence despite their awareness of family violence. To design a qualitative study, you might use SPIDER to support you in formulating your research question. You purposefully sample GPs, varying in age, gender, years of experience and type of practice (S-1). You might also decide to sample patients, in a variety of life situations, who have been faced with the problem (S-2). You clarify the phenomenon of family violence, which might be broadly defined when you design your study—e.g. family abuse and violence (PI-1). However, as your study evolves you might feel the need for fine-tuning—e.g. asking about intimate partner violence (PI-2). You describe the design, for instance, a phenomenological study using interviews (D), as well as the ‘think, feel or do’ elements you want to evaluate in your qualitative research. Depending on what is already known and the aim of your research, you might choose to describe actual behaviour and experiences (E-1) or explore attitudes and perspectives (E-2). Then, as your study progresses, you also might want to explain communication and follow-up processes (E-3) in your qualitative research (R).

Each of your choices will be a trade-off between the intended variety, depth and richness of your findings and the required samples, methods, techniques and efforts for data collection and analyses. These choices lead to different research questions, for example:

• ‘What are GPs’ and patients’ attitudes and perspectives towards discussing family abuse and violence?’ Or:
• ‘How do GPs behave during the communication and follow-up process when a patient’s signals suggest intimate partner violence?’

Designing qualitative studies

How do i choose a qualitative design.

As in quantitative research, you base the choice of a qualitative design primarily on the nature of the research problem, the research question and the scientific knowledge you seek. Therefore, instead of simply choosing what seems easy or interesting, it is wiser to first consider and discuss with other qualitative researchers the pros and cons of different designs for your study. Then, depending on your skills and your knowledge and understanding of qualitative methodology and your research topic, you might seek training or support from other qualitative researchers. Finally, just as in quantitative research, the resources and time available and your access to the study settings and participants also influence the choices you make in designing the study.

What are the most important qualitative designs?

Ethnography [ 4 ], phenomenology [ 5 ], and grounded theory [ 6 ] are considered the ‘big three’ qualitative approaches [ 7 ] ( Box 2 ). Box 2 shows that they stem from different theoretical disciplines and are used in various domains focusing on different areas of inquiry. Furthermore, qualitative research has a rich tradition of various designs [ 2 ]. Box 3 presents other qualitative approaches such as case studies [ 8 ], conversation analysis [ 9 ], narrative research [ 10 ], hermeneutic research [ 11 ], historical research [ 12 ], participatory action research and [ 13 ], participatory community research [ 14 ], and research based on critical social theory [ 15 ], for example, feminist research or empowerment evaluation [ 16 ]. Some researchers do not mention a specific qualitative approach or research tradition but use a descriptive generic research [ 17 ] or say that they used thematic analysis or content analysis, an analysis of themes and patterns that emerge in the narrative content from a qualitative study [ 2 ]. This form of data analysis will be addressed in Part 3 of our series.

The ‘big three’ approaches in qualitative study design. Based on Polit and Beck [ 2 ].

Definitions of other qualitative research approaches. Based on Polit and Beck [ 2 ].

Depending on your research question, you might choose one of the ‘big three’ designs

Let us assume that you want to study the caring relationship in palliative care in a primary care setting for people with COPD. If you are interested in the care provided by family caregivers from different ethnic backgrounds, you will want to investigate their experiences. Your research question might be ‘What constitutes the caring relationship between GPs and family caregivers in the palliative care for people with COPD among family caregivers of Moroccan, Syrian, and Iranian ethnicity?’ Since you are interested in the caring relationship within cultural groups or subgroups, you might choose ethnography. Ethnography is the study of culture within a society, focusing on one or more groups. Data is collected mostly through observations, informal (ethnographic) conversations, interviews and/or artefacts. The findings are presented in a lengthy monograph where concepts and patterns are presented in a holistic way using context-rich description.

If you are interested in the experiential world or ‘life-world’ of the family caregivers and the impact of caregiving on their own lives, your research question might be ‘What is the lived experience of being a family caregiver for a family member with COPD whose end is near?’ In such a case, you might choose phenomenology, in which data are collected through in-depth interviews. The findings are presented in detailed descriptions of participants’ experiences, grouped in themes.

If you want to study the interaction between GPs and family caregivers to generate a theory of ‘trust’ within caring relationships, your research question might be ‘How does a relationship of trust between GPs and family caregivers evolve in end-of-life care for people with COPD?’ Grounded theory might then be the design of the first choice. In this approach, data are collected mostly through in-depth interviews, but may also include observations of encounters, followed by interviews with those who were observed. The findings presented consist of a theory, including a basic social process and relevant concepts and categories.

If you merely aim to give a qualitative description of the views of family caregivers about facilitators and barriers to contacting GPs, you might use content analysis and present the themes and subthemes you found.

What is the role of theory in qualitative research?

The role of theory is to guide you through the research process. Theory supports formulating the research question, guides data collection and analysis, and offers possible explanations of underlying causes of or influences on phenomena. From the start of your research, theory provides you with a ‘lens’ to look at the phenomenon under study. During your study, this ‘theoretical lens’ helps to focus your attention on specific aspects of the data and provides you with a conceptual model or framework for analysing them. It supports you in moving beyond the individual ‘stories’ of the participants. This leads to a broader understanding of the phenomenon of study and a wider applicability and transferability of the findings, which might help you formulate new theory, or advance a model or framework. Note that research does not need to be always theory-based, for example, in a descriptive study, interviewing people about perceived facilitators and barriers for adopting new behaviour.

What is my role as a researcher?

As a qualitative researcher, you influence the research process. Qualitative researchers and the study participants always interact in a social process. You build a relationship midst data collection, for the short-term in an interview, or for the long-term during observations or longitudinal studies. This influences the research process and its findings, which is why your report needs to be transparent about your perspective and explicitly acknowledge your subjectivity. Your role as a qualitative researcher requires empathy as well as distance. By empathy, we mean that you can put yourself into the participants’ situation. Empathy is needed to establish a trusting relationship but might also bring about emotional distress. By distance, we mean that you need to be aware of your values, which influence your data collection, and that you have to be non-judgemental and non-directive.

There is always a power difference between the researcher and participants. Especially, feminist researchers acknowledge that the research is done by, for, and about women and the focus is on gender domination and discrimination. As a feminist researcher, you would try to establish a trustworthy and non-exploitative relationship and place yourself within the study to avoid objectification. Feminist research is transformative to change oppressive structures for women [ 16 ].

What ethical issues do I need to consider?

Although qualitative researchers do not aim to intervene, their interaction with participants requires careful adherence to the statement of ethical principles for medical research involving human subjects as laid down in the Declaration of Helsinki [ 18 ]. It states that healthcare professionals involved in medical research are obliged to protect the life, health, dignity, integrity, right to self-determination, privacy and confidentiality of personal information of research subjects. The Declaration also warrants that all vulnerable groups and individuals should receive specifically considered protection. This is also relevant when working in contexts of low-income countries and poverty. Furthermore, researchers must consider the ethical, legal and regulatory norms and standards in their own countries, as well as applicable international norms and standards. You might contact your local Medical Ethics Committee before setting up your study. In some countries, Medical Ethics Committees do not review qualitative research [ 2 ]. In that case, you will have to adhere to the Declaration of Helsinki [ 18 ], and you might seek approval from a research committee at your institution or the board of your institution.

In qualitative research, you have to ensure anonymity by code numbering the tapes and transcripts and removing any identifying information from the transcripts. When you work with transcription offices, they will need to sign a confidentiality agreement. Even though the quotes from participants in your manuscripts are anonymized, you cannot always guarantee full confidentiality. Therefore, you might ask participants special permission for using these quotes in scientific publications.

The next article in this Series on qualitative research, Part 3, will focus on sampling, data collection, and analysis [ 19 ]. In the final article, Part 4, we address two overarching themes: trustworthiness and publishing [ 20 ].

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the following junior researchers who have been participating for the last few years in the so-called ‘Think tank on qualitative research’ project, a collaborative project between Zuyd University of Applied Sciences and Maastricht University, for their pertinent questions: Erica Baarends, Jerome van Dongen, Jolanda Friesen-Storms, Steffy Lenzen, Ankie Hoefnagels, Barbara Piskur, Claudia van Putten-Gamel, Wilma Savelberg, Steffy Stans, and Anita Stevens. The authors are grateful to Isabel van Helmond, Joyce Molenaar and Darcy Ummels for proofreading our manuscripts and providing valuable feedback from the ‘novice perspective’.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

University of Notre Dame

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

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Contextualizing Knowledge

Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, Contextualizing Knowledge, Oxford University Press, 2017, 288pp., $60.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780199682706.

Reviewed by Bernhard Salow, Trinity College Cambridge

Epistemic contextualism holds that "know" picks out different relations when uttered in different contexts. The "knowledge first" program maintains that phenomena such as evidence, justification, warranted assertion, or rational action should be understood in terms of knowledge. The thesis of this book is that these two ideas are compatible, even mutually supporting. Along the way to defending this thesis, Ichikawa offers new and interesting accounts of counterfactuals, evidence, justification, the epistemic norms governing action and assertion, and the nature of belief; clarifies a host of issues surrounding epistemic contextualism; and makes important contributions to the debate about epistemic internalism.

Chapter 1 lays out Ichikawa's preferred version of contextualism about "know". Being careless about use and mention (which Ichikawa is more scrupulous about), the view is:

S knows that p iff S has evidence E such that (i) S has a belief that p which is properly based on E and (ii) all the relevant E cases are p cases. (p.25)

This is contextualist because which cases are relevant depends, in part, on the context in which "S knows that p" was uttered: more cases will usually be relevant when the sentence is used in a sceptical context in which more possibilities are considered than when it is used in a trusting context in which many of those possibilities are ignored.

Chapter 2 develops a theory of counterfactuals, which connects with the analysis of knowledge; since this is a slight detour, I will skip it here.

Chapter 3 discusses evidence, a notion featured in the account of knowledge. Surprisingly, Ichikawa combines his analysis with the "knowledge first" idea that E=K, that someone's evidence consists in all and only the claims they know (or rather that in every context, "someone's evidence consists in all and only the claims they know" expresses a truth.) This does not trivialize the analysis: it now says that a proposition is known if it is either basic knowledge (a belief which is both knowledge and properly based in itself) or else based on some other knowledge (and hence, ultimately, on some basic knowledge) which entails it across relevant cases. "Basic knowledge", moreover, is context-invariant, and we can give an independent account of what it consists in. Ichikawa considers two options: a Cartesian account on which it consists in certain facts about one's phenomenal state, and a disjunctivist account, on which it consists in beliefs formed through the successful exercise of perceptual abilities; he slightly favours the second, less familiar kind, and shows that it retains many of contextualism's advantages.

Chapters 4-6 were, for me, the highlight of the book. They offer accounts of justified belief, having a reason for action, and warranted assertion, all in knowledge-theoretic terms. While each of the accounts is new and creative in its own way, there is a unifying thread: unlike most "knowledge first" approaches to these phenomena, Ichikawa's proposals all respect internalist intuitions.

Consider Ingo, who has formed the belief that it's 3pm, by reading an ordinarily reliable clock -- which, as it happens, is currently stopped. And compare Noah, who did the same, but with a clock that was still running. Ingo doesn't know that it's 3pm, while Noah does. On many "knowledge first" accounts, this difference amplifies: Noah's, but not Ingo's, belief that it's 3pm is justified; Noah, but not Ingo, has warrant to assert that it's 3pm; that it's 3pm is amongst Noah's, but not Ingo's, reasons for action, so that different decisions might be rational for them. These consequences can feel like externalism run amok.

Chapters 4-6 offer interesting, and novel, alternatives. Chapter 4 develops a theory of justification:

S's belief that p is justified iff there is a possible individual alike to S with respect to all relevant basic evidence and cognitive processing, whose corresponding belief is knowledge. (p.115)

So, Ingo is justified after all -- as witnessed by Noah, a knower who shares Ingo's relevant basic evidence and cognitive processing. More generally, if one of a pair of internal duplicates (duplicates in terms of basic evidence and processing) is justified in believing something, so is the other.

Chapter 5 addresses reasons for action, taking a different approach. Ichikawa accepts that Ingo and Noah have different reasons; but he argues that their reasons rationalize the same actions, and that this captures all the probative intuitions. Why would Ingo's reasons support the same actions as Noah's? Because, while Ingo fails to know that it's 3pm, he knows nearby facts which support the same actions -- say, that the clock reads 3pm and it usually gets it right. More generally, Ichikawa conjectures (p.170), the correct theory of which actions are supported by which reasons may entail that the knowledge had by internal duplicates always support the same actions.

This conjecture, unfortunately, faces pressure from the fact that Ingo's "back-up" reasons seem ever so slightly weaker than Noah's "original" ones. So, if Noah's reasons only just rationalize an action whose success depends upon it being 3pm, Ingo's may fail to do the same. Ichikawa constructs cases illustrating this problem, and floats a contextualist response; which he, however, fails to endorse. As an alternative, he suggests (p.181) retracting the conjecture, and instead severing the connection between what one's reasons support and what one ought to do; the latter can then be fixed by one's basic knowledge, hence one's internal state, even if the former is not.

Chapter 6 discusses warranted assertion, again addressing the Ingo/Noah challenge (although, this time, Ichikawa does not motivate his proposal that way). His idea uses the notion of a context's presuppositions -- the claims which the speakers are taking for granted:

S's assertion that p made in context C is warranted iff S stands in the knowledge-relation to p relative to the set of possibilities compatible with C's presuppositions; that is (i) S has a belief that p which is properly based in some of her evidence E and (ii) all the E cases consistent with C's presuppositions are p cases. (p.210)

I don't think this proposal is quite right. For the proposal is made in an ordinary, non-sceptical context. In such a context "Noah's evidence includes the fact that it's 3pm" expresses a truth. But now suppose Noah deduces some other claim from this evidence -- say, that it's after 2:45pm. Then Noah will, even when he is in a sceptical context where it's not presupposed that the clock is running as normal, be entitled to assert "it's after 2:45pm"; for this belief is true in every possibility in which it's 3pm, and that it's 3pm is the evidence he based it on. This is not what Ichikawa intended. Note also that Noah will not be entitled to assert "it's 3pm"; for that belief is based only on things -- e.g. that the clock reads 3pm -- which fail to entail it across the possibilities consistent with the presuppositions of the sceptical context. But it's absurd to think that Noah has warrant to assert "it's after 2:45pm" but not "it's 3pm", given the details of our story. The problem is easily fixed by inserting "basic" in front of "evidence" in clause (i) above, since that it's 3pm isn't part of Noah's basic evidence; and those things which are part of his basic evidence -- e.g. that the clock reads 3pm -- don't entail the truth of his belief that it's after 2:45pm across the possibilities consistent with the presuppositions of the sceptical context. Corrected in this way, the account predicts that internal duplicates in identical contexts have warrant to make all the same assertions. When in a context that presupposes that the clock is working, Ingo and Noah are both licensed to assert that it's 3pm; when in a context that doesn't presuppose this, neither is.

Finally, chapter 7 develops a contextualist account of belief (or "full belief"):

S believes that p iff S rejects every relevant not-p possibility. (pp.229, 234)

Which possibilities are relevant varies with context (belief-relevance and knowledge-relevance don't always coincide); and rejecting a possibility is a more basic attitude than belief, one you take when you categorically rule out a possibility.

Summarized like this, this volume is a series of individual discussions, united only by loose connections in their topics and some of the philosophical resources they employ. Ichikawa presents it differently: as an extended defence of the thesis that epistemic contextualism and the "knowledge first" program are compatible. But I think mine is the right way to present it, for two reasons. First, because the individual proposals are well worth discussing even if, like me, one is unconvinced by Ichikawa's attempt to use them in defence of his main thesis; second, because the book often leaves unclear how the different proposals fit together. Let me expand on both.

In Ichikawa's presentation, the proposals are united by their ability to respond to an influential style of argument that contextualism and the "knowledge first" program make a poor combination. Consider a simple knowledge norm; say, that one is warranted in asserting only what one knows. And consider two speakers in different contexts, thinking about S's assertion that p. Because of the difference in context, speaker 1 can truly say "S knows that p" while speaker 2 can truly say "S doesn't know that p". Using the knowledge norm of assertion, speaker 1 infers "S's assertion was warranted" while speaker 2 infers "S's assertion was unwarranted". We don't want the normative notion ("unwarranted" in this case) to come out context-sensitive, as that would dilute its normative force. So, we need the conclusions to disagree: one of the two has to be wrong. But how, when both were inferred only from truths?

Ichikawa gives different answers, depending on the notion at issue. If the speakers are assessing beliefs for justification, their apparently conflicting conclusions of "S's belief is justified" and "S's belief is unjustified" won't disagree -- "justification", like "knowledge", is context-sensitive. If the speakers are assessing actions or assertions, the correct norm won't licence apparently conflicting conclusions from the two speakers, since what S should do and assert is determined by context-invariant facts about her basic evidence (and, in the latter case, the context she finds herself in). If the speakers are assessing whether S's belief falls short of its "aim" (a property discussed in ch.7), their apparently contradictory conclusions "S's belief that p achieves its aim" and "S's belief that p falls short of its aim" fail once more to disagree; but because this is due to context-sensitivity in "believe" rather than "aim", the normative notion remains undiluted.

I found these reconciliations slightly disappointing. The treatment of justification simply bites the bullet, accepting that "justification" is context-sensitive and hence lacks the relevant normative "oomph". The treatment of action and assertion essentially bypasses the context-sensitive notion of "knowledge" and proceeds in terms of the context-invariant notion of "basic knowledge". This is more interesting, but it effectively abandons the "knowledge first" program, conceding that knowledge -- unlike basic knowledge -- is not so important after all. (Ichikawa claims (p.182) that knowledge still enjoys relative priority here; but I don't see why, since there is no obvious sense in which the analysis of "warranted assertion" or "rational action" in terms of basic knowledge goes through knowledge along the way -- especially if we take Ichikawa's "back-up" option of disconnecting "ought" from "reasons" when discussing actions, and modify the norm of assertion in the way I suggested above.) The treatment of the aim of belief is more satisfying; but, as Ichikawa recognizes, that strategy has limited scope, since we eventually hit phenomena (such as what S did, or what S asserted) that don't depend on context.

The second reason why I struggle to find more unity in the book is more straightforward: the book often leaves unclear how the ideas it develops fit together. For example, suppose Ichikawa's original account of rational action is successful, because reasons constituted by non-basic knowledge never make a difference to what you should do. Then it is tempting to apply that same approach to justified belief: instead of opting for Ichikawa's account, why not say that a belief is justified if it is supported by your evidence, and then appeal to the redundancy of non-basic evidence to reconcile this with internalism and respond to the disagreement problem discussed above? On the flipside, if we have a knowledge-theoretic account of justified belief, why wouldn't we (even as "knowledge firsters") use this in our accounts of action or assertion? Ichikawa does not address these questions; but if he were putting the various proposals forward as parts of a unified view, he really should. In a similar vein, I was unclear about how chapters 4 and 7 fit together. It's tempting to think that they must interact: "justified belief" and "belief" are surely not orthogonal topics. But neither chapter acknowledges the other, so no interactions are addressed.

A final observation, this time about style as much as substance. The book engages with the extensive literature on both contextualism and the "knowledge first" program very explicitly and in great depth (chapter 6 has subsections entitled "De Rose 2002" and "De Rose 2009"), resulting in numerous detours and asides. Thankfully, Ichikawa writes very clearly, and explains the literature in sufficient detail that each detour can be followed. This means that there are benefits to his approach: if you're not embedded in the literature, reading the book will bring you up to date; and if you are, you won't have to work too hard to find out what Ichikawa would say about your favourite issue (and what he says in these detours is always worth considering, and often exactly right). But there are also costs. For with all the detours, it's easy to lose the main thread, and the most interesting ideas sometimes don't begin to surface until two-thirds through a chapter. Even when they do surface, they are often put forward rather tentatively, making them harder to distinguish from ideas raised only to reject or set aside. Experienced readers should be fine -- but advanced undergraduates, and even some graduate students, may need additional guidance on which sections of a chapter to focus on. Given that Ichikawa's writing is so clear and accessible in other respects, this feels like a missed opportunity.

I have harped on about the book's shortcomings, especially its lack of a convincing unifying thread. So, lest I give the wrong impression, let me close by saying that I thoroughly enjoyed the book, and learned much from reading it. It is filled to the brim with important clarifications, convincing objections, and creative proposals on each of the many topics it touches on. Perhaps the whole is, in this case, not much greater than the parts -- but when the parts are great, who cares?

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Kevin Dorst, Rachel Fraser, and Ginger Schultheis for comments and discussion.