John Hawthorne

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Western Philosophy 20th-century philosophy
Name:	Hawthorne, John
Birth:
School/tradition:	analytic philosophy
Main interests:	philosophy of language, epistemology
Influences:	William Alston, Stewart Cohen, Timothy Williamson

John Hawthorne is the Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford University. Along with Jason Stanley, Hawthorne has defended a form of contextualism in epistemology that makes the required justification for knowledge vary by the knower's interests. Unlike semantic varieties of contextualism, Hawthorne does not claim that the meaning of the word "know" changes from context to context, but only the required evidence needed for justification. This position can be classed as a form of pragmatism (Hawthorne, 2004: p. 180).