Author:

Keywords:

Arts & Humanities, Philosophy, Epistemic contextualism, Subject-sensitive invariantism, Embarrassing counterfactuals, Fake barn cases, SUBJECT-SENSITIVE INVARIANTISM, KNOWLEDGE, 2203 Philosophy, 5003 Philosophy

Abstract:

© 2017, Springer Science+Business Media B.V. A powerful objection to subject-sensitive invariantism (SSI) concerns various ‘strange-but-true’ (or “embarrassing”) conditionals. One popular response to this objection is to argue that strange-but-true conditionals pose a problem for non-sceptical epistemological theories in general. In the present paper, it is argued that strange-but-true conditionals are not a problem for contextualism about ‘know’. This observation undercuts the proposed defence of SSI, and supplies a surprising new argument for contextualism.