to appear in Contextualism in Philosophy: On Epistemology, Language and Truth Gerhard Preyer and Georg Peter (eds.), Oxford University Press The Emperor’s New ‘Knows’ KENT BACH When I examine contextualism there is much that I can doubt. I can doubt whether it is a cogent theory that I examining, and not a cleverly stated piece of whacks. I can doubt whether there is any real theory there at all. Perhaps what I took to be a theory was really some reflections; perhaps I am even the victim of some cognitive hallucination. One thing however I cannot doubt: that there exists a widely read pitch of a round and somewhat bulgy shape. - a traditional epistemologist 1 The title of this paper calls for it to stick to the obvious. Even if it did, it would probably not convince the contextualist. Knowing that, I will be comforted by the thought that whether or not ‘knows’ is a context-sensitive term, at least ‘obvious’ and ‘convincing’ are. Perhaps ‘context-sensitive’ is context-sensitive too. I begin, in Section I, with what contextualism says, what it doesn’t say, and what it implies about knowledge attributions. Even if contextualism is true and, contrary to invariantism, a given knowledge-ascribing sentence can express various propositions in various contexts, those propositions are not themselves context-bound. This is something that contextualists do not make clear. In section II, I will sketch the contextualist’s strategy for containing skepticism and discuss whether this strategy really explains why unsuspecting people can be duped by skeptical arguments. An alternative explanation is that the conflicting intuitions that give rise to skeptical paradoxes don’t really bear on the 1 The allusion here, if it needs to be make explicit, is to this famous passage from traditional epistemologist H. H. Price’s Perception (1932, 3): “When I see a tomato there is much that I can doubt. I can doubt whether it is a tomato that I am seeing, and not a cleverly painted piece of wax. I can doubt whether there is any material thing there at all. Perhaps what I took to be a tomato was really a reflection; perhaps I am even the victim of some hallucination. One thing however I cannot doubt: that there exists a red patch of a round and somewhat bulgy shape, standing out from a background of other colour-patches, and having a certain visual depth, and that this whole field of colour is of colour is directly present to my consciousness.”