The Appearance of Ignorance

Contextualism, the view that the epistemic standards a subject must meet in order for a claim attributing "knowledge" to her to be true do vary with context, has been hotly debated in epistemology and philosophy of language during the last few decades. This volume presents, develops, and defends contextualist solutions to two of the stickiest problems in epistemology: the puzzles of skeptical hypotheses and of lotteries. It is argued that, at least by ordinary standards for knowledge, we do know that skeptical hypotheses are false, and that we've lost the lottery. Why it seems that we don't know that they're false tells us a lot, both about what knowledge is and how knowledge attributions work. The Appearance of Ignorance is the companion volume to Keith DeRose's 2009 title The Case for Contextualism: Knowledge, Skepticism, and Context, Volume 1.