Abstract

Traditionally, work in epistemology has been dominated by two general approaches: foundationalism and coherentism. Epistemological contextualism, which has its roots in the writings of pragmatists like Dewey and in the later Wittgenstein, represents an alternative to the dominant views, but an alternative that is typically ignored. Poor management and bad press have certainly contributed to lack of interest in this philosophical product. However, when it comes to philosophical questions about justification and knowledge in ethics, contextualism strikes me as a promising approach—more promising than either foundationalism or coherentism. The central aim of this paper is to put ethical contextualism into serious contention by developing, at least in outline, a plausible version of the view—something missing from the current philosophical landscape. Anything like a full defense of this view would require developing it in the context of a story about the semantics and associated metaphysics of moral discourse. That project is for another occasion. Here, I have the more limited aim of convincing the reader to take ethical contextualism seriously.