 That perfect knowledge requires that it be “impossible for us ever to have any reason for doubting what we are convinced of” marks an extraordinarily high standard of justification. Is this the only standard deserving of knowledge-talk? This is a difficult question to answer, because Descartes didn’t write in English. But arguably he’s an epistemic contextualist, at least in the sense of invoking the notion of knowledge in divergent contexts that presuppose different epistemic standards. We’ll see, for example, that he holds that even the deductive demonstrations of expert geometers fall short of the standards needed for perfect knowledge; yet, the kind of terminology he uses to characterize their epistemic achievements is routinely rendered in terms of knowledge-talk, in standard English translations of his work.