The Context Shiftiness Dilemma Generalized
Most actors in the debate assume that the intuitive variability of proper assertion with practical stakes (the Shiftiness Intuition) motivates the following dilemma: either 1) we embrace a knowledge norm of assertion, and are forced into a view that takes knowledge, or ‘knowledge’, to be sensitive to practical stakes, or 2) we stick to our Classical Invariantist guns, but then the knowledge norm goes out the window and we get practical sensitivity in the normativity of assertion (the Shiftiness Dilemma). This chapter brings this dilemma to centre stage and argues that it threatens to generalize in three ways: to all context-invariant norms of proper assertoric speech, to all constative speech acts, and to all epistemic normative constraints. If this is right, we should be more worried about this dilemma than we’ve been so far.