Contextualism in Epistemology and Beyond || Contextualism and Unhappy-Face Solutions: Reply to Schiffer

Contextualism and Unhappy-Face Solutions: Reply to SchifferAuthor(s): Stewart CohenSource: Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the AnalyticTradition, Vol. 119, No. 1/2, Contextualism in Epistemology and Beyond (May, 2004), pp. 185-197Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4321493 .

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STEWART COHEN

CONTEXTUALISM AND UNHAPPY-FACE SOLUTIONS: REPLY TO SCHIFFER

In "Skepticism and the Vagaries of Justified Belief', Stephen Schiffer proposes a way to think about philosophical responses to paradoxes.' On Schiffer's view, most philosophical paradoxes do not admit of what he calls a "happy-face" solution.

A happy-face solution to a paradox does two things, assuming that the propositions comprising the set really are mutually incompatible: first, it identifies the odd-guy-out, the member of the set that's not true; and second, it shows us why this spurious proposition deceived us, strips from it its patina of truth, so that we're not taken in it by it again. (p-)

According to Schiffer, there is no happy-face solution for the classic skeptical paradox which he renders thus:

[B] (1) I'm not fully justified in believing that there's a blue

cube before me unless I have a justification for believing that I'm not a BIV (brain-in-a-vat) which goes beyond whatever justification is provided by my current sensory experience.

(2) I have no such justification. (3) I'm not fully justified in believing that there's a blue cube

before me.

Schiffer argues that all of the leading proposed happy face solutions, among which he counts contextualism, fail.

According to Schiffer, some philosophical paradoxes admit of what he calls "unhappy face solutions" and he proposes such a solution for the classical skeptical paradox.2 Schiffer's unhappy face solution denies premise (2) of B, holding that we are justified in believing we are not BIVs because such justification is presupposed by our being justified in believing any empirical proposition.

La Philosophical Studies 119: 185-197, 2004. O0 2004 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.



186 STEWART COHEN

What exactly is an unhappy face solution? Schiffer tell us that an unhappy face solution is needed when the ordinary concept that generates the paradox contains a "glitch", an inconsistency in its "underived conceptual role". Eliminating the glitch thus involves a certain amount of conceptual revision. The glitch in the concept of justification is displayed by the paradox [B]. A (weak) unhappy face solution to a paradox, proposes a glitch-free version of the concept that can do the work we expected from the problematic version of the concept, viz., count as justified, any perceptual belief p, when in normal circumstances we have a sense experience as of p's being the case (P-). This new and improved version of the concept enables us to make sense of our justified belief ascriptions - they need not lead to inconsistency - thereby vindicating our unavoidable practice of making assertions about the external world.

What makes the new concept glitch-free? Schiffer's answer is that we stipulate it to be so.

If, as seems to be the case, that justification can't be earned, then there is nothing for it but to count our disbeliefs in skeptical hypotheses as justified and be done with it. With those beliefs out of the way, we can have a notion of justified belief that can do the work we want it to do. A rehabilitated notion of justified belief should simply count us as a priori justified in disbelieving skeptical defeating hypotheses, even though nothing earns that justification. (p-)

When a paradox does not admit of a happy-face solution, there is no plausible way to deny one of the propositions in the inconsistent set that constitutes the paradox. The "patina of truth" will remain. So we construct a substitute concept such that one of the propositions in the inconsistent set is false, when interpreted as being about that concept.

As Schiffer puts it:

Given the notion of justified belief we actually have, we can't say that premise (2) of [B] is false; still less can we say that we have an unearned a priori justification for disbelieving BIV or any other skeptical hypothesis. But if we let 'justification*' be the rehabilitated notion of epistemic justification I'm proposing by way of a weak unhappy-face solution to the paradox [B] provides, and we replace 'justification' and its cognates in my statement of [B] with 'justification*' and its cognates, then we can say that premise (2) is determinately false owing to our being a priori justified* in disbelieving BIV. (p-)

So although we can not plausibly hold that we have an independent justification for denying skeptical hypotheses (proposition



CONTEXTUALISM AND UNHAPPY-FACE SOLUTIONS 187

(2) of the skeptical paradox), by stipulation, we can can hold that we have an independent justification* for denying skeptical hypotheses. We are a priori justified* in denying such hypotheses.

Schiffer's strategy for dealing with the classic skeptical paradox raises many questions. Having made the distinction between, happy and unhappy-face solutions, Schiffer proceeds as if his unhappy face solution is the only one available. But it is unclear why this should be so. Schiffer tells us that the point of a weak unhappy face solution is to provide a glitch-free version of the concept that does the indispensable work of the original glitchy concept, viz., counting p as justified "when in normal circumstances we have a sense experience as of p's being the case". But surely this constraint does not determine a unique solution. Schiffer meets the constraint by denying premise (2). On his view, I have an a priori justification, or we should say "justification*" for believing I am not a BIV. But I see no reason why we could not meet the constraint by denying premise (1).

This is clearest in the case where we deny premise (1) by denying closure.3 Suppose we construct a concept of justification (to use Schiffer's way of talking) for which closure fails - call it justification**. When discussing happy face solutions to the paradox, Schiffer considers the closure denying option and notes that it has the ludicrous implication that one could know that modus ponens was truth preserving, yet not be able to make justified inferences in accordance with it.

I agree with Schiffer that to deny closure is to be saddled with ludicrous consequences. But he reaches a similar conclusion about his own view that we can be a priori justified in believing we are not BIVs - when construing it as a happy-face solution.

Crispin Wright had it right when he asked rhetorically, "[How can it] be rational to have confidence in the truth of a proposition for which one has absolutely no evidence.... That a warrant to believe that.someone else is not currently under- going a sustained lucid dream would have to be evidence-based seems absolutely compelling; how can it make a difference if the subject involved is oneself?" [my emphasis] (p-)

I do not think it would do serious violence to Wright's point to interpret him as meaning that it would be ludicrous to view ourselves as a priori justified in denying skeptical hypotheses. Now Schiffer



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view is that this very same approach, construed as an unhappy-face solution escapes the problem. Apparently, Schiffer maintains that although it would be ludicrous to hold that we are a priori justified in denying skeptical hypotheses, by stipulation, it is not ludicrous to hold that we are a priori justified* in denying skeptical hypotheses.

But for analogous reasons, Schiffer's objection that closure denial for justification has ludicrous consequences can have no force against a version of that view that construes it as a unhappy- face solution. By parity of reasoning, though it is ludicrous to deny closure for justification, it is not ludicrous to deny closure, by stipulation, for justification**. Moreover, justification** can do the work Schiffer requires of an unhappy face solution to the skeptical paradox, viz, count as justified any belief p when in normal circumstances we have a sense experience as of p's being the case,

But according to Schiffer, even unhappy-face solutions must count as justified any deductive consequence of these sensory beliefs.

... the closure of justified beliefs under known entailment isn't negotiable; no coherent notion of justified belief can deem us justified in believing a proposition but not in believing what we know to be entailed by that proposition. (p-)

Schiffer makes this point in the context of discussing what shape an unhappy-face solution to the skeptical paradox has to take. On his way of talking, both justification* and justification"* are notions of justification. Thus Schiffer is claiming that while justification* is a coherent notion of justification, justification"* is not.

What exactly does Schiffer mean by a "coherent notion of justified belief". By Schiffer's own lights, there are good reasons for thinking that both justification* and justification** are incoherent if identified with our ordinary concept of justification. The whole point of a happy- face solution is to propose a new concept which by stipulation has a feature it would be incoherent to suppose the ordinary concept has. It is hard to know on what basis Schiffer can claim that justification* is coherent, but justification** is not.

Perhaps Schiffer's reason for thinking that closure "isn't negotiable", even when construed as an element of an unhappy face solution, is that deductive inference is an essential method by which we extend our knowledge. Denying closure would seem to call




this method into question, thereby failing to vindicate many of our justified belief ascriptions.

But we can accommodate this concern. We can restrict closure for justification** in a way that relieves us of the burden of being justified in denying that we are BIVs, while still enabling us to make use of deductive inference. Here we can appeal to the very criterion Schiffer uses on his view to distinguish those defeaters we are justified in denying independently of our sensory evidence, from those we cannot so deny. Schiffer does not want to give up entirely the requirement that we have evidence for denying the defeaters of our empirical beliefs. Rather he allows that we can be a priori justified* in denying those defeaters whose "falsity is presupposed by the perceptual beliefs we can't help but have", e.g., the BIV hypothesis (p-). But then we could appeal to that same distinction in our restric- tion of the closure principle. We could say that if I'm justified** in believing p and I'm justified** in believing that p entails q, then I'm justified** in believing q, provided that q is not presupposed by the perceptual beliefs we can't help but have. So I see no basis for Schiffer's claim that closure is non-negotiable.4

Finally, I want to question whether what Schiffer is calling "an unhappy face solution" counts as a solution to the problem posed. We can pursue this question by considering what truth-value Schiffer's unhappy-face solution assigns to our everyday ascriptions of justification. A natural way to construe Schiffer's view would have it that all such ascriptions are false, or perhaps meaningless. After all, Schiffer claims that our ordinary concept of justification pulls us in different directions and "... there is nothing in our concept of epistemic justification or elsewhere that resolves these conflicts". But if justification is an irredeemably inconsistent concept, then no ascription of justification can be true.. So we can never truly ascribe justification to any belief.

If this is so, then it's hard to see in what sense Schiffer's view constitutes a solution (unhappy-face or otherwise) to the skeptical paradox. If no beliefs are justified, (or if the notion of justification is meaningless) then it seems that the skeptic has won. Now Schiffer would demur that he has constructed a glitch-free version of the concept that can do the work of the old concept and thereby make sense of our epistemic practice. Is this a genuine advance?



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The first thing to note is that, as a practical matter, we were getting along fine with our old ordinary concept of justification. The paradox arises only as a theoretical matter.

Schiffer's unhappy-face response to the theoretical problem is to construct a new concept of justification that is just like the old concept except that the paradox does not arise for it. And the reason the paradox does not arise for Schiffer's new concept is that by stipulation, premise two of the paradoxical argument is false when interpreted in terms of the new concept.

Is this an interesting response to the paradox? The fact that we can construct competing unhappy face solutions (closure denial, being just one instance5) with no apparent basis for deciding among them suggests that it is not very interesting.

But perhaps there is a way to interpret Schiffer's view that avoids the embarrassment of multiple solutions with no basis for choosing among them. Begin by denying that there is a sharp distinction between conceptual and non-conceptual truths. When Schiffer talks about "our concept of justification", we can take him to be referring to our deep-rooted ways of thinking about justification, or perhaps our core beliefs about justification. To 'revise our concept' is just to give up one of these core beliefs.6

On this sort of a view, we can hold that our everyday justification ascriptions are true. Our ordinary beliefs have the property of being justified. And when we say things of the form, "B is justified" the word 'justified' in our mouths picks out that property. Our only problem is that we have a false belief, albeit a relatively core one, about that property, viz., that no belief that we are not bivs can be a priori justified. Schiffer's unhappy-face solution tells us that a belief that we are not brains-in-a-vat is in fact a priori justified.

If this is the view, then Schiffer's response to the paradox comes down to nothing more than the claim that one of the propositions that constitute the paradox, viz. (2), is false. But this response can not be considered anything like a solution to the paradox. The skeptical paradox consists of a set of jointly inconsistent propositions, each of which is independently highly plausible. To solve, or perhaps resolve the paradox, it is not enough to simply deny one of the propositions in the set. Such an approach leaves us wondering why,




if the proposition is false, we find it so compelling. We are left with no explanation for how the paradox arises.

Compare the contextualist treatment of the paradox with Schiffer's. An immediate advantage of Contextualism over Schiffer's view is that it provides an explanation for why we have these paradoxical intuitions. According to Contextualism, those intuitions result from our tendency to conflate the proposition expressed in strict contexts by sentences of the form "S is justified in believing P" with the proposition expressed by sentences of that form in everyday contexts.

In order to make this view work, the contextualist has to posit a kind of semantic blindness on the part of competent speakers of the language. But according to Schiffer, this

... as I argued in my (1995/6) ... commits the contextualist to an implausible error theory ... It commits the contextualist to saying that when a token of [B] expresses a sound argument, then the ordinary person's reluctance to accept the conclusion is due to her not realizing that the proposition the token of (3) asserts isn't the one that an utterance of (3) would express in a quotidian context - namely, the false proposition that relative to standard Easy/context Quotidian, I'm not justified Y - but is instead the true proposition that relative to standard Tough/context Philosophical, I'm not justified Y. This is about as plausible as the idea that a competent speaker might state that it's raining in New York in uttering 'It's raining' but mistakenly think she's stating that it's raining in Los Angeles. (P-)

But as I have argued against Schiffer (Cohen, 1999/2001), there is nothing implausible about the contextualist's semantic blindness thesis. Consider ascriptions of flatness. You can lead competent speakers to question their everyday ascriptions of flatness by making salient "bumps" that ordinarily we do not pay attention to. As Peter Unger (1975) demonstrated, taking this strategy to the extreme, e.g., by calling attention to microscopic surface irregularities, one can lead competent speakers to worry whether anything is really flat. But Unger's case for flatness skepticism is interesting precisely because many who feel the pull of flatness skepticism look back on their previous flatness ascriptions and think they may have been wrong.

Should we worry that all along we have been speaking falsely when we have called things 'flat'? Surely not. Philosophical reflec- tion will convince most that ascnptions of flatness are relative to



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context-sensitive standards.7 Flatness comes in degrees, and how flat a surface must be in order to count as flat simpliciter depends on the context. Roads that count as flat in a conversation among Coloradans, do not generally count as flat in a conversations among Kansans. And while one can truly ascribe flatness to a table in everyday conversations, one might not be able to truly ascribe flatness to that same table when setting-up a sensitive scientific experiment. If we implicitly raise the standards high enough (by making salient microscopic bumps), then perhaps, relative to that context, no physical surface really is flat. But of course, that does not impugn our ascriptions of flatness in everyday contexts where the standards are more lenient.

So the controversy over whether anything is flat can be resolved by noting that ascriptions of flatness are context-sensitive. But then why can we get competent speakers to question their everyday flatness ascriptions by implicitly raising the standards? It must be that although ascriptions of flatness are context-sensitive, competent speakers can fail to realize this. And because they can fail to realize this, they can mistakenly think that their reluctance to ascribe flatness, in a context where the standards are at the extreme, conflicts with their ascriptions of flatness in everyday contexts. That is to say, they conflate the proposition expressed by "X is flat" at a strict context, with the proposition expressed by that sentence at more lenient context.

So there is nothing implausible about combining a contextualist semantics with an error theory of the sort endorsed by Contextu- alism. As we have seen in the case of flatness skepticism, competent speakers can be unaware of, and so misled by, the kind of context- sensitivity I have argued is involved in ascriptions of justification and knowledge.

Having said that, I should note that there is an important difference between contextualist solutions to flatness skepticism and contextualist solutions to justification/knowledge skepticism.

Contextualist theories of flatness ascriptions gain easy and wide- spread acceptance among most people. But contextualist theories of justification/knowledge do not. This is something a contextualist - one like me anyway who relies on the analogy - needs to explain. Here's a somewhat speculative attempt: Justification and




knowledge are normative concepts. To say that a belief is justified or constitutes knowledge is to say something good about the belief. We value justification and knowledge. But contextualist theories are deflationary. Contextualism about knowledge says that most of our everyday utterances of the form "S knows P" are true, even though the strength of S's epistemic position in those instances does not meet our highest standards. In the same way, contextualism about flatness says that most of are everyday utterances of sentences of the form "X is flat" are true, even though X's surface may fall short of perfect flatness. In other words, contextualism is a "good news, bad news" theory. The good new is that we have lots of knowledge and many surfaces are flat; the bad news is that knowledge and flatness are not all they were cracked up to be. We find this much easier to accept in the case of flatness than knowledge, because ascriptions of flatness do not have the normative force that ascriptions of knowledge/justification do. So the question arises: If knowledge is what the contextualist says it is (at least, in those instances where we have it) is it indeed worth having?

This is a fair question. But as a dialectical point, this worry does not favor unhappy face solutions like Schiffer's over contextualism. For an unhappy face solution is also a deflationary, "good new, bad news" solution. It's also true for unhappy face solutions that although we have knowledge/justification, it turns out not be all that it's cracked up to be. In order to save justification, Schiffer has to give up part of its "underived conceptual role".

Schiffer goes on to allege a further problem for contextualism.

Suppose that relative to standard Tough I'm not justified in believing that there's a blue cube before me, but that relative to standard Easy I am justified. Should I try not to believe that there's a blue cube before me, or is the endorsement of standard Easy enough to get me off the hook? It's true at the same time that I'm not justified by Tough but am justified by Easy, and we need to know how that is supposed to affect whether I believe that there is a blue cube before me. Of course, it's clear what the contextualist about justified belief has to say. If she says that it's Tough that governs, then she'll have to say that we shouldn't have any beliefs about the external world and that therefore we should never assert any propositions about the external world. That wouldn't be much of a reply to the skeptic. So the contextualist about justified belief must say that Easy governs what we're to believe. Yet that makes Easy the only operative standard of justification, the only one to bear on belief formation, and one has to then wonder in what sense Tough is a standard of justified belief. (P-)



194 STEWART COHEN

Schiffer's question seems to be this: If my belief that there's a blue cube before me is justified relative to everyday standards but not justified relative to strict standards, should I, or should I not believe that there is a blue cube before me? But I take it that the question of whether I should believe that proposition is just the question of whether I'm justified in believing it.8 Thus, Schiffer's question presupposes that there is a context-invariant notion of justification that can settle the question of whether I should believe independently of any context. But this is just what the contextualist denies. Contrary to what Schiffer presupposes, there is no single context- invariant thing the contextualist should say about the standards that govern our beliefs.

But Schiffer seems to think this puts the individual believer in a quandary. In effect he asks, "If my belief is justified by one standard but not justified by another, should I believe it or not?" But he can not ask that question independently of a particular context. And for the contextualist, the 'justification' predicate will have different meanings, corresponding to different standards, in different contexts. So the question, in his mouth, will have different meanings in different contexts. The correct answer will be determined by whatever context he is in.

Schiffer's final objection concerns the contextualist's claim that in everyday contexts we are justified in believing that we are not bivs or strictly speaking, that "we are justified in believing we are not bivs" is true at everyday contexts.

... if relative to Easy I'm justified in believing that there's a blue cube before me, then, since I know that if there is one before me, then I'm not a BIV, the contextualist must allow that relative to Easy I'm justified in believing that I'm not a BIV. Yet this would evidently be a justification earned just by my seeming to see a blue cube before me, without any independent justification for thinking I'm not a BIV, and it's this thought precisely that is being challenged by the skeptic. (P-)

Schiffer attributes to the contextualist the view that we are justified in everyday contexts in believing we are not bivs on the basis of our perceptual seemings. But this is not the view of any of the philosophers who have advocated this contextualist solutions to the paradox, viz., David Lewis (1996), Keith de Rose (1995) or myself (1988, 1999). I'm the only one who formulates his theory in terms of




a justification requirement, but each of us has provided an account of how one knows (in everyday contexts) one is not a BIV. And none of us holds the view Schiffer attributes to us. Lewis holds that the conditions that suffice for one to properly presuppose that one is not a BIV are sufficient for one to know one is not a BIV, in everyday contexts. DeRose holds that one can know, in an everyday context, that one is not a BIV just in case one's belief that one is not a BIV matches the fact as to whether one is not a BIV, in the near worlds selected by that context. I myself have said something very similar to what Schiffer says in his unhappy face solution, viz., that one has a kind of a priori justification for denying that one is a BIV. But for me of course, this holds true only for everyday contexts.

Now Schiffer might want to claim that these accounts are implausible. But notice that he says the very same thing about his own view, when interpreted as a happy-face solution. Recall that a happy-face solution purports to strip the patina of truth from the proposition in the inconsistent set it denies. It is precisely this worry that leads Schiffer to put forth his account as an unhappy-face solution, a kind of solution that makes no such pretense. But in this respect Contextualism. is like an unhappy-face solution (contrary to Schiffer's classification of it as a happy-face solution). Contextu- alism makes no pretense of stripping the patina of truth from the denied proposition. In fact, a contextualist solution predicts that owing to our tendency to conflate contexts, the patina of truth will remain for some of the sentences it denies. This is predicted in particular for the contextualist claim that the sentence, "I know I'm not BIV on the basis of ... [fill in for the particular contextualist account]" is true in everyday low-standard contexts, since the very context in which we consider the sentence, will be one in which the standards are raised and the sentence is false. As I noted earlier this is a virtue of the contextualist account and in particular what makes it count as a solution to the skeptical paradox. Contextualism does not merely deny one of the propositions in the inconsistent set. Rather it explains why despite its falsity, we are inclined to accept it. Thus Contextualism provides an explanation for how the paradox arises.

This is precisely where Schiffer's own view falls short. Schiffer's view denies (2) of the skeptical paradox B, holding that that we



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are a priori justified in denying that we are not BIVs. But if (2) is false, what explains why are we so strongly inclined to accept it? Schiffer tells us that our concept of justification has a glitch in it. But as I have argued, there are two ways to understand this claim and neither makes it suitable as an explanation. On the first interpretation, we are inclined to accept (2) because it is in fact true (we really aren't a priori justified in believing we are not BIVs, merely a priori justified*). But as I noted, such a view provides little of theoretical interest and simply concedes the case to the skeptic. On the second interpretation, (2) is false. We are inclined to accept (2) because we have a false core belief that we are not a priori justified in believing we are not BIVs. But this just pushes the question back to why we have this false core belief. And Schiffer has provided us with no explanation for why we have this false core belief. Thus Schiffer has provided no explanation for the how the paradox arises. And because of this, Schiffer has failed to provide us with anything that counts as a solution to the paradox.9

NOTES

1 All page references are to this work. 2 Schiffer distinguishes between a weak unhappy-face solution and a strong unhappy-face solution. "A weak unhappy-face solution is a mildly unhappy-face solution and says that a glitch-free version of the concept is possible which does the work we expected from the problematic concept, whereas a strong unhappy- face solution is a very unhappy-face solution and says that no such unparadoxical surrogate can be fashioned." When in this paper, I talk about an unhappy-face solution, I am referring to a weak unhappy-face solution. 3 What I say about closure denial could also be applied to dogmatism. See note 4. 4 There are several possibilities for supporting Schiffer's claim that he does not mention. One might argue that closure is more central to the ordinary concept of justification than any claim about the possibility of a priori justification for denying skeptical hypotheses. Supposing that's true, it is not clear that this will help. For according to Schiffer, the ordinary notion of justification contains a glitch and must be replaced by a substitute normative notion that can do the work of the old notion. The point is to show that we thereby can vindicate our unavoidable practice of making assertions about the world. It's not clear how it is relevant to this project that one normative notion is closer to our ordinary concept of justification than another.

Another possibility would be to construe Schiffer's talk about unhappy face solutions as code for David Lewis's approach to theoretical terms. Spotting




ourselves the notion of a platitude, the issue then would be to determine the nearest realizer of the "ramsified theory". Obviously, discussion of this issue would take us to far afield from what Schiffer actually says. 5 Consider justification*** which is such that that we can be justified*** in denying skeptical hypotheses on the basis of those denials being entailed by our perceptual beliefs. 6 Admittedly, this interpretation of Schiffer is hard to square with his talk of justification and justification*. 7 Lewis (1979), Dretske (1981) and Unger (1984). 8 Of course there are shoulds of morality and prudence that can govern our beliefs - or I would prefer to say, our attempts to get ourselves to believe - but those are irrelevant to the epistemic concerns of Contextualism. 9 I thank Tom Blackson, John Devlin, Greg Fitch, John Hawthorne, and Bernie Kobes for helpful discussion of these issues.

REFERENCES

Cohen, S. (1988): 'How to be a Fallibilist', in J. Tomberlin (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives, Vol. 2, Epistemology.

Cohen, S. (1999): 'Contextualism, Skepticism, and the Structure of Reasons', in J. Tomberlin (ed.), Philosophical Perspectives, Vol. 13, Epistemology.

Cohen, S. (2001): 'Contextualism Defended: Reply to Feldman', Philosophical Studies (June).

De Rose, K. (1995): 'Solving the Skeptical Problem', The Philosophical Review 104, 1.

Dretske (1981): 'The Pragmatic Dimension of Knowledge', Philosophical Studies 40.

Lewis (1979): 'Scorekeeping in a Language Game', Journal of Philosophical Logic 8.

Lewis (1996): 'Elusive Knowledge', Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74(4). Schiffer (2003): 'Skepticism and the Vagaries of Justified Belief', Philosophical

Studies 119 (this issue). Unger, P. (1975): Ignorance: A Case for Skepticism, Oxford. Unger, P. (1984): Philosophical Relativity, University of Minnesota.

Department of Philosophy Arizona State University Scottsdale, AZ 85258 USA E-mail: [email protected]



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Contextualism in Epistemology and Beyond || Contextualism and Unhappy-Face Solutions: Reply to Schiffer