The late 1980s and early 1990s saw the rise of contextualist theories of knowledgeascriptions (and denials). Contextualists about ‘knows’ maintain that utterances of theform ‘S knows p’ and ‘S doesn’t know p’ resemble utterances such as ‘Peter is here’and ‘Peter is not here’, in the sense that their truth-conditions vary depending uponfeatures of the context in which they are uttered. In recent years, contextualism about‘knows’ has come under heavy attack. This has been associated with a proliferation ofdefences of so-called invariantist accounts of knowledge ascriptions, which standunited in their rejection of contextualism.The central goal of the present work is two-fold. In the first instance, it is to bring outthe serious pitfalls in many of those recent defences of invariantism. In the secondinstance, it is to establish that the most plausible form of invariantism is one that issceptical in character. Of course, the prevailing preference in epistemology is for non-sceptical accounts. The central conclusions of the thesis might therefore be taken toshow that – despite recent attacks on its plausibility – some form of contextualismabout ‘knows’ must be correct. However, this project is not undertaken without atleast the suspicion that embracing (a particular form of) sceptical invariantism is to bepreferred to embracing contextualism. In the course of the discussion, I therefore notonly attempt to rebut some standard objections to sceptical invariantism, but also toreveal – in at least a preliminary way – how the sceptical invariantist might best arguefor the superiority of her account to that of the contextualist.
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