Contextualism and scepticism: Even-handedness, factivity and surreptitiously raising standards

The central contentions of this paper are two:first, that contextualism about knowledge cannot fulfil the eirenic promise which, for those who are drawn to it, constitutes, I believe, its main attraction; secondly, that the basic diagnosis of epistemological scepticism as somehow entrapping us, by diverting attention from a surreptitious shift to a special rarefied intellectual context , rests on inattention to the details of the principal sceptical paradoxes. These contentions are consistent with knowledge-contextualism, of some stripe or other, being true. What follows will not bear directly on that.