Standard Contextualism Strikes Back

Abstract

Standard contextualism regarding epistemic modality is a family of theories that state that the modal base of an epistemic is determined solely by the context of utterance and the evaluation world. Recently it has been argued that standard contextualism is untenable because it cannot account for dialogues featuring (dis)agreement with epistemic claims and for the semantic import of epistemics embedded under attitude verbs. I present a new variant of standard contextualism, Practical Contextualism, which successfully accounts for both kinds of phenomena, and in some cases makes better predictions than its current non-standard-contextualist competitors.