Shifty Contextualism About Epistemics

Abstract

According to a highly natural, orthodox view, epistemic modals like might and must are contextually variable, allowing us to express different propositions in different contexts of utterance. This view (contextualism about epistemic modals) is the orthodox one because the only other ways of making sense of how epistemic expressions are sensitive to information (views like relativism, expressivism, and dynamicism) carry such unorthodox commitments. Yet it has faced more than its share of challenges. In this paper, I will argue that two important challenges for contextualism about epistemic modals receive the very same solution: one problem about disagreement, and one problem about the reasonableness of our epistemic beliefs. The first of these challenges is very familiar, and the second less so, but equally important.