Universalism,which was once widely influential in the western academic tradition,is nowadays facing more and more challenges.There are two reasons for this:on the one hand,those people who hold belief in the universality of knowledge cannot provide rigorous and powerful arguments for it;and on the other hand,its opponents’work shows that the criteria of knowledge are not universal but context dependent.The opponents’work provides a possibility for the proposal of the Contextualist view of knowledge.As an analytic perspective,this new view of knowledge analyzes scientific knowledge in its concrete context,and shows that knowledge is context dependent both in the dimension of individual cognition and in the dimension of social cognition.We can understand it from the three aspects of text,practice and social culture.The Contextualist view of knowledge is not one type of "strong version" but "soft version".
