How Knowledge Helps
The word “you” refers to a special person, relying on the conversational context during which it's uttered; particularly, it is dependent upon the person one is addressing. Other context-sensitive phrases are gradable adjectives like “tall”—how tall one thing must be to count as “tall” is dependent upon the conversational context—and quantifiers like “everyone”—which folks rely as a half of “everyone” is decided by the conversational context. Contextualists about “knows” suppose that this verb belongs on the record of context-sensitive terms . A consequence of contextualism is that sentences containing “knows” could specific distinct propositions, depending on the conversational contexts in which they’re uttered. This function allows contextualists to offer an efficient, although not uncontroversial, response to skepticism. For a more thorough overview of contextualism and its bearing on skepticism, see Rysiew 2011 or Ichikawa forthcoming-b. It is treated as a query about basic