**Contingent Knowledge**
Contingent knowledge is based on an intersubjective agreement that emerged within specific conditions - including the various material resistances, social forces, and conceptual assumptions, that contributed to these conditions.
To say that a knowledge-claim is contingent is to emphasise that any assessment of a claim should be done in reference to the conditions within which it was generated and in terms of the contexts within which the knowledge is to be applied. (This is in contrast to the view that scientific claims are either necessarily true or necessarily false such that any community that embarks on a project akin to science will inevitably end up believing what we do).
While often positioned in contrast to [objective knowledge](https://osf.io/c9adt/), many scholars reject this dichotomy to argues that it is possible - even preferable - to view objective knowledge as the product of procedures that emerge in situated conditions.
An appreciation of *contingency* has played an important role in developing the view of scientific knowledge as [simultaneously objective and contingent](https://osf.io/8wer2/) that is now shared by many philosophers of scientific practices (although, by no means all).
*Examples of this interest in contingent knowledges can be found in:*
- Chang, Hasok. 2015. ‘Cultivating Contingency: A Case for Scientific Pluralism’. In Science as It Could Have Been, 359–82. Discussing the Contingency/Inevitability Problem. University of Pittsburgh Press. http://www.jstor.org.ezp.lib.unimelb.edu.au/stable/j.ctt19rmb0p.19.
- Soler, Léna. 2015. ‘Introduction: The Contingentist/Inevitabilist Debate: Current State of Play, Paradigmatic Forms of Problems and Arguments, Connections to More Familiar Philosophical Themes’. In Science as It Could Have Been, 1–42. Discussing the Contingency/Inevitability Problem. University of Pittsburgh Press. http://www.jstor.org.ezp.lib.unimelb.edu.au/stable/j.ctt19rmb0p.4.
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on [Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-epistemology/)
