Knowledge in Context: The Factivity Principle and Its Epistemological Consequences

The traditional analysis of the notion of knowledge seems to neglect that although we gather many of our beliefs under the flag of “knowledge” we do not always employ the same standards to bestow this title to them. The semantic thesis known as epistemic contextualism, instead, clearly vindicates and accounts for this phenomenon concerning our epistemic custom. Unfortunately, however, epistemic contextualism faces a severe objection - known in the philosophical literature as the factivity problem, - that seriously menaces its own survival. This objection, indeed, claims that the contextualist who endorses two well-known epistemological principles that he should not desire to give up (i.e. the factivity principle, according to which knowledge implies truth, and the closure principle, that maintains that knowledge is closed under known logical implication) cannot coherently state his own theory. Here, after an analytical introduction of the contextualist’s thesis, we propose an analysis of the factivity problem by a critical scrutiny of the main strategies proposed to solve the conundrum. We will show that some of these strategies make some interesting moves forward in the unravelling of the puzzle, but that they all achieve a solution to the factivity problem only at that which seem to be high prices for contextualism.