Contextualism

In philosophy, contextualism describes a collection of views in the philosophy of language which emphasize the context in which an action, utterance or expression occurs, and argues that, in some important respect, the action, utterance or expression can only be understood within that context. Contextualist views hold that philosophically controversial concepts, such as "meaning P," "knowing that P," "having a reason to A," and possibly even "being true" or "being right" only have meaning relative to a specified context. Some philosophers hold that context-dependence may lead to relativism; nevertheless, contextualist views are increasingly popular within philosophy.

In ethics, "contextualist" views are most closely associated with situational ethics, or with moral relativism.

Methodologies for empirical research in criminology have developed Comparative contextual analysis.

Philosophy of language

In philosophy of language, "contextualism" is commonly used to refer to the view of language expressed by Gottlob Frege's "context principle"; that is, that the philosopher should only ask after the meanings of expressions in the context of a proposition, and that attempts to find the meaning of a word in isolation are the cause of prominent philosophical errors. Contextualism of this sort in philosophy of language is commonly contrasted with compositionalism.

The more relevant notion of contextualism in the philosophy of language is to point out that certain words vary in reference depending on context of use. The most obvious examples are indexicals like "I", "here", and "now", and demonstratives like "that", "this", and certain uses of "he", "she", and "it" when accompanied by pointing. (These uses of third-person pronouns are not to be confused with their uses in anaphora, to refer to an earlier word in the sentence. Compare "John said that he was not the killer" (anaphoric) and, while pointing at Bill, "John said that he was not the killer" (demonstrative).) There are also a few other words that are obviously context-sensitive - "foreigner" refers to one set of people when uttered in the United States (or among Americans) and another set when uttered in Canada (or among Canadians). Invariantists argue that these are the only context-sensitive words, while contextualists argue that many others are context-sensitive as well.

A phenomenon not to be confused with contextualism is ambiguity. The sentence "John went to the bank" can either mean that he visited a financial institution or that he decided to go fishing on the side of a river. It may seem that contextual factors are relevant in determining the meaning of the word "bank". However, philosophers and linguists generally agree that these two meanings are actually two different words that just coincidentally happen to be pronounced and spelled the same. On looking them up in a dictionary, they will have separate entries. The phenomenon is quite different with "I" - in most dictionaries, it will probably only have one (relevant) definition, saying something like "the person speaking". Every speaker uses the word "I" with the same meaning to refer to a different individual, and the same speaker uses the words "here" and "now" to refer to different places and different times, even though she has the same meaning in mind each time. On this account, ambiguity is no more philosophically interesting than the fact that the words "raze" and "raise" happen to be pronounced the same - with "bank" and "bank" it's just a coincidence that English happens to both pronounce them the same and spell them the same as well.

Moderate Contextualism

The phenomenon that (moderate) contextualists allege is that various words that are not obviously indexicals or demonstratives have context-sensitivity that is not mere ambiguity. A common example is supposed to be the word "tall". For instance, when talking about clocktowers, it may be correct to say that "Big Ben is tall", but when talking about famous world buildings it may be incorrect. This is because Big Ben is tall for a clocktower, but not tall for a world building, since it is far shorter than the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, the Eiffel Tower, and many others. The word "tall" clearly uses the same dictionary entry in both cases (it's not like the bank/bank case), and yet the sentence seems to have different truth values, despite the references of all the other words being fixed. Thus, the word "tall" must express something different in the two cases, just as the word "I" refers to one person when I use it, and to another when you do. Thus, the contextualist suggests that the meaning of the word "tall" is somehow sensitive to the context of its use, just like indexicals and demonstratives.

Other examples that seem to provide good examples for contextualism are "ready" ("Mary is ready" may be true when talking about soccer practice, but false when talking about taking her history test), "expensive", "clean", "smooth", and various other gradable adjectives of this sort.

Invariantism

The invariantist argues that in fact, these words are not contextual at all. The two utterances of "Big Ben is tall" only seem to have different truth values, but in fact have the same truth value. However, there is some pragmatic implicature beyond the literal content of the utterance in each case that we judge to be correct in the one case but not in the other.

Radical Contextualism

Some (radical contextualists) argue that not only gradable adjectives and some other clear examples are context-sensitive, but rather all words and expressions are actually context sensitive. For instance, a chair may be red in one context, but not in another. A certain object might be a penguin in one context and not in another (say, if the first context compares the object to other stuffed animals, while the second context compares it to living creatures in Antarctica). Someone may be said to have gone to the gym in one context and not in another (say, if the first context is talking about how far down the street she jogged before turning back, while the second is talking about whether she lifted weights).

The invariantist position seems to commit one to an odd position that there is a definite fact of the matter as to whether Big Ben is tall or not, and that what this fact is doesn't depend on what we are talking about. The radical contextualist position seems to make a theory of semantics nearly impossible. The moderate contextualism position leaves one in an uneasy tension of accepting some examples as really demonstrating contextualism while denying other examples that seem almost just as good. Thus, all of these positions have problems.

Epistemology

In epistemology, contextualism refers to the treatment of the word "know" as context-sensitive. Contextualist accounts of knowledge became increasingly popular toward the end of the 20th century as responses to the problem of skepticism. Since the skeptic tries to undermine the very possibility of knowledge by showing that there are many states of affairs that are consistent with our evidence for a belief but these beliefs are false, the contextualist has moved to block certain states of affairs from being relevant in talk of knowledge. The claim, attributed to Stewart Cohen, Fred Dretske, Gail Stine, David Lewis, and more recently, Keith DeRose, Michael Williams and others, is that the word 'knowledge' is a sort of indexical.

The standards for knowledge, the contexualist claims, vary from one user's context to the next. Thus, if I say "John knows that his car is in front of him", the utterance is true just in case (1) John believes that his car is in front of him, (2) the car is in fact in front of him, and (3) John meets the epistemic standards that my (the speaker's) context selects. This is a loose contextualist account of knowledge, and there are many significantly different theories of knowledge that can fit this contextualist template and thereby come in a contextualist form.

For instance, an evidentialist account of knowledge can be an instance of contextualism if it's held that how strongly supported by one's evidence one's belief must be if it is to count as knowledge is a contextually varying matter. And one who accepts a "relevant alternatives" account of knowledge -- on which to know that p one must be able to rule out all the relevant alternatives to p -- can be a contextualist by holding that what range of alternatives are relevant is sensitive to conversational context. DeRose adopts a type of modal or "safety" (as it has since come to known) account on which knowledge is a matter of one's belief as to whether or not p is the case matching the fact of the matter, not only in the actual world, but also in the sufficiently close possible worlds: Knowledge amounts to there being no "nearby" worlds in which one goes wrong with respect to p. But how close is sufficiently close? It's here that DeRose takes the modal account of knowledge in a contextualist direction, for the range of "epistemically relevant worlds" is what varies with context: In high standards contexts one's belief must match the fact of the matter through a much wider range of worlds than is relevant to low standards contexts.

The main tenet of contextualist epistemology, no matter what account of knowledge it is wedded to, is that when we attribute knowledge to someone, what matters is in what context we use the term 'knowledge'. If we use it in everyday conversational contexts, the contextualist maintains, we can save most of the knowledge we think we have from skeptical hypotheses. If the term 'knowledge' is used when skeptical hypotheses are being considered, then the utterances regarding knowledge that a person has are false. It is important to note that this theory does not allow that someone can have knowledge at one moment and not the other, for this would hardly be a satisfying epistemological answer. What contexutalism entails is that in one context an utterance of a knowledge attribution can be true, and in a context with higher standards for knowledge, the same statement can be false. This happens in the same way that 'I' can correctly be used (by different people) refer to many people at the same time.

External links

Bibliography of papers on contextualism in epistemology
Article on 'The Fallacy of Contextualism'
IEP entry on Contextualism
Insensitive Semantics - by Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore, arguing against contextualism