Dynamic Lexicon vs. Contextualism

When I was in Scotland for the International Conference on Linguistics and Epistemology I heard Peter Ludlow speak for the first time (i.e. it was the first time I heard him speak, I was not, in fact, there for his first words ever). I found the concept of the Dynamic Lexicon fascinating and much more plausible that run-of-the-mill contextualism. Also, it seems to offer another way to avoid the Knowledge Norm stuff.

The Knowledge Norms folks offer as evidence for their view that people will follow the following speech pattern.

A: “P.”

B: “But do you know P?”

A: “OK fine, withdrawn.”

Their explanation is that B has called A to account to the knowledge norm.

It seems much more natural to me that A senses B’s invocation of a stronger sense of “know” and agrees to discourse that way. This is not standards contextualism because the standards aren’t what’s generating a new context but rather A is going along with B’s current usage of “know”. It’s about interpersonal conversational dynamics it seems to me. I think this speech is consistent with A’s continuing to believe P and since belief is a sort of inner correlate of assertion she doesn’t feel she’s violated any objective norm. She’s just being nice. The Moorean—by contrast—is not being nice. She refuses to adopt the stronger sense of knows and stubbornly sticks with her own. This is part of what explains why people urging skeptical arguments get frustrated with Mooreans: we're taking our ball and going home. So THERE. Na na na na NA na! :P

This appeals to me considerably as I'm not one to just play along, I'm kind of contrarian and stubborn that way. I suppose Lewis's contextualism has this feature too, I can just give a rip what the skeptic says and keep it from being salient to me. Also, the sort of subject sensitive invariantism Hawthorne describes could have a feature like this if one steels oneself against skeptical worries.

At any rate, the Dynamic Lexicon idea makes much more sense to me than contextualism. It's easy for me to understand linguistic accommodation. It's far less easy for me to understand what salience really is and how items come to have it and lose it. Too many discussions of contetualism gloss over this, some talk as if the mere *mention* of skepticism necessarily shifts context in a way I can't resist. Bah!