ABSTRACT
Conversational contextualism says that the set of relevant alternatives depends on conversational kinematics. This chapter outlines the most sophisticated version of conversational contextualism, which is the view defended by Michael Blome-Tillmann. It explains the serious problems of the conversational contextualism. The chapter considers the three responses against rule of pragmatic presupposition (RPP) and conversational contextualism. It provides the ample motivation for considering alternative ways of thinking about contextualism. Contextualism is the view that knowledge ascriptions – utterances of sentences containing the word "knows" – express different propositions in different contexts of utterance. Conversational contextualists hold that an alternative being relevant is a matter of it being appropriately related to things like the common ground, speaker intentions, expectations and pragmatic presuppositions. The chapter argues that RPP is as much at odds with epistemological orthodoxy as RTT. It explains why the conversational contextualism problem is an instance of a more general problem for a certain kind of view of semantic context-sensitivity.
