Contextualising Knowledge: Epistemology and Semantics

Contextualising Knowledge is my 2017 monograph with Oxford University Press. Here is OUP’s product page. It is also available from various retailers. You may have institutional access via Oxford Scholarship Online.

The book developed and synthesised two main ideas: contextualism about knowledge ascriptions and a knowledge-first approach to epistemology. The theme of the book is that these two ideas fit together much better than it's widely thought they do. Not only are they not competitors: they each have something important to offer the other. I pay particular attention to how contextualists should think about knowledge norms—the knowledge norm of assertion, of belief, of practical reasoning, etc.

I have made the Introduction and Table of Contents available online here.

Here is a pre-production draft of the manuscript (under a previous working title). Please note that this version has many errors that have been corrected, and certainly a few that haven't. Please cite the published version.

There were some mistakes in the published version. The ones I know about are listed here.

Reviews

"Ichikawa offers new and interesting accounts of counterfactuals, evidence, justification, the epistemic norms governing action and assertion, and the nature of belief; clarifies a host of issues surrounding epistemic contextualism; and makes important contributions to the debate about epistemic internalism. ... I thoroughly enjoyed the book, and learned much from reading it. It is filled to the brim with important clarifications, convincing objections, and creative proposals on each of the many topics it touches on." - Bernhard Salow for Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

“The book makes many fruitful points worth pondering, and presents a dazzling array of overlapping lines of creative argumentation. I recommend it to anyone interested in acquiring a deeper acquaintance with some of the major concerns of contemporary analytic epistemology.” - Geoff Pynn for The Philosophical Review