Epistemic Contextualism: An Inconsistent Account for the Semantics of “Know”?

The contextualistic account for the semantic behaviour of the term “know” - a position labelled as “epistemic contextualism” - combined with the widely accepted idea that “know” is a factive verb seems to lead to a very unpleasant conclusion: epistemic contextualism is inconsistent. In section 1 we first examine some aspects of the epistemological meaning of the contextualist semantics of “know”, then in section 2 we sketch the problem which leads to the supposed inconsistency of epistemic contextualism and in section 3 we analyse some solutions that have been proposed to solve the problem which are, in our view, unsatisfactory. In section 4 we present our attempt of solution.