Contextualism

In philosophy, contextualism describes a collection of views 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.

Epistemology

In epistemology, 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 DeRoseand 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 contextualism, now 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 refer to many people at the same time.

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 in philosophy of language is commonly contrasted with compositionalism.

Ethics

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

Crimonology

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

External link

Bibliography of papers on contextualism in epistemology

Article on 'The Fallacy of Contextualism'

IEP entry on ContextualismÂÈ

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.
It uses material from the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contextualism Wikipedia article Contextualism.