 Perhaps the most prominent example here is the role that the view that “knows” is an indexical has played in recent epistemology. This view is often called “contextualism about knowledge”; and in general, the view that some term F is an indexical is often called “contextualism about F”. Contextualism about knowledge is of interest in part because it promises to provide a kind of middle ground between two opposing epistemological positions: the skeptical view that we know hardly anything about our surroundings, and the dogmatist view that we can know that we are not in various Cartesian skeptical scenarios. (So, for example, the dogmatist holds that I can know that I am not a brain in a vat which is, for whatever reason, being made to have the series of experiences subjectively indistinguishable from the experiences I actually have.) Both of these positions can seem unappealing—skepticism because it does seem that I can occasionally know, e.g., that I am sitting down, and dogmatism because it’s hard to see how I can rule out the possibility that I am in a skeptical scenario subjectively indistinguishable from my actual situation.