Contextualism
Encyclopedia
Contextualism describes a collection of views in philosophy
Philosophy
Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Philosophy is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational...

 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 relative to 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
Relativism
Relativism is the concept that points of view have no absolute truth or validity, having only relative, subjective value according to differences in perception and consideration....

; nevertheless, contextualist views are increasingly popular within philosophy.

In ethics
Ethics
Ethics, also known as moral philosophy, is a branch of philosophy that addresses questions about morality—that is, concepts such as good and evil, right and wrong, virtue and vice, justice and crime, etc.Major branches of ethics include:...

, "contextualist" views are often closely associated with situational ethics, or with moral relativism
Moral relativism
Moral relativism may be any of several descriptive, meta-ethical, or normative positions. Each of them is concerned with the differences in moral judgments across different people and cultures:...

.

In architectural theory
Architectural theory
Architectural theory is the act of thinking, discussing, or most importantly writing about architecture. Architectural theory is taught in most architecture schools and is practiced by the world's leading architects. Some forms that architecture theory takes are the lecture or dialogue, the...

, contextualism is a theory of design wherein modern building types are harmonized with urban forms usual to a traditional city.

Introduction

In epistemology, contextualism is the treatment of the word 'knows' as context-sensitive. Context-sensitive expressions are ones that "express different propositions relative to different contexts of use". For example, some terms that are relatively uncontroversially considered context-sensitive are indexicals, such 'I', 'here', and 'now'. While the word 'I' has a constant linguistic meaning
Linguistic meaning
The nature of meaning, its definition, elements, and types, was discussed by philosophers Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas. According to them 'meaning is a relationship between two sorts of things: signs and the kinds of things they mean '. One term in the relationship of meaning necessarily...

 in all contexts of use, whom it refers to varies with context. Similarly, epistemic contextualists argue that the word 'knows' is context sensitive, expressing different relations in some different contexts. What varies with context is how well-positioned a subject must be with respect to a proposition to count as "knowing" it. Contextualism in epistemology then is a semantic thesis about how 'knows' works in English, not a theory of what knowledge, justification, or strength of epistemic position consists in. However, epistemologists combine contextualism with views about what knowledge is to address epistemological puzzles and issues, such as skepticism
Skepticism
Skepticism has many definitions, but generally refers to any questioning attitude towards knowledge, facts, or opinions/beliefs stated as facts, or doubt regarding claims that are taken for granted elsewhere...

, the Gettier problem
Gettier problem
A Gettier problem is a problem in modern epistemology issuing from counter-examples to the definition of knowledge as justified true belief . The problem owes its name to a three-page paper published in 1963, by Edmund Gettier, called "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?", in which Gettier argues...

, and the Lottery paradox
Lottery paradox
Henry E. Kyburg, Jr.'s lottery paradox arises from considering a fair 1000 ticket lottery that has exactly one winning ticket. If this much is known about the execution of the lottery it is therefore rational to accept that some ticket will win. Suppose that an event is very likely only if the...

.

Contextualist accounts of knowledge became increasingly popular toward the end of the 20th century, particularly as responses to the problem of skepticism
Skepticism
Skepticism has many definitions, but generally refers to any questioning attitude towards knowledge, facts, or opinions/beliefs stated as facts, or doubt regarding claims that are taken for granted elsewhere...

. Contemporary contextualists include Michael Williams
Michael Williams (philosopher)
Michael Williams is currently the Kreiger-Eisenhower Professor of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University and chair of the department. Williams is a noted epistemologist, and has significant interest in the philosophy of language, Wittgenstein, and the history of modern philosophy. He is...

, M.A. Carrano, Stewart Cohen, Keith DeRose
Keith DeRose
Keith DeRose is an American philosopher currently teaching at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. He is Allison Foundation Professor of Philosophy at Yale. DeRose has also overseen Dissertations at Rutgers University - New Brunswick, where he works with legendary epistemologists such as...

, David Lewis, Gail Stine, and George Mattey.

The main tenet of contextualist epistemology, no matter what account of knowledge it is wedded to, is that knowledge attributions are context-sensitive. That is, when we attribute knowledge to someone, the context in which we use the term 'knowledge' determines the standards relative to which "knowledge" is being attributed (or denied). If we use it in everyday conversational contexts, the contextualist maintains, most of our claims to "know" things are true, despite skeptic's attempts to show we know little or nothing. But if the term 'knowledge' is used when skeptical hypotheses are being discussed, we count as "knowing" very little, if anything. Contextualists use this to explain why skeptical arguments can be persuasive, while at the same time protecting the correctness of our ordinary claims to "know" things. 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 contextualism 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) to refer to different people at the same time.

Thus, the standards for attributing knowledge to someone, 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 if and only if (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
Evidentialism
Evidentialism is a theory of justification according to which the justification of a belief depends solely on the evidence for it. Technically, though belief is typically the primary object of concern, evidentialism can be applied to doxastic attitudes generally...

 account of knowledge can be an instance of contextualism if it's held that strength of justification is a contextually varying matter. And one who accepts a relevant alternative's
Relevant alternatives theory
Relevant Alternatives Theory is an epistemological theory of knowledge, according to which to know some proposition p one must be able to rule out all the relevant alternatives to p.-Introduction:...

 account of knowledge 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 be 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.

Criticisms

However, contextualist epistemology has been criticized by several philosophers. Contextualism is opposed to any general form of Invariantism, which claims that knowledge is not context-sensitive (i.e. it is invariant). More recent criticism has been in the form of rival theories, including Subject-Sensitive Invariantism (SSI), mainly due to the work of John Hawthorne (2004), and Interest-Relative Invariantism (IRI), due to Jason Stanley
Jason Stanley
Jason Stanley is an American philosopher currently teaching at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. His primary interests include linguistics, cognitive science, philosophy of language, and epistemology...

 (2005). SSI claims that it is the context of the subject of the knowledge attribution that determines the epistemic standards, whereas Contextualism maintains it is the attributor. IRI, on the other hand, argues that it is the context of the practical interests of the subject of the knowledge attribution that determines the epistemic standards. Stanley writes that bare IRI is "simply the claim that whether or not someone knows that p may be determined in part by practical facts about the subject's environment." ("Contextualism" is a misnomer for either form of Invariantism, since "Contextualism" among epistemologists is considered to be restricted to a claim about the context-sensitivity of knowledge attributions (or the word "knows"). Thus, any view which maintains that something other than knowledge attributions are context-sensitive is not, strictly speaking, a form of Contextualism.) DeRose (2009) responds to recent attacks on contextualism, and argues that contextualism is superior to these recent rivals.

An alternative to contextualism called contrastivism
Contrastivism
Contrastivism is an epistemological theory proposed by Jonathan Schaffer that suggests that knowledge attributions have a ternary structure of the form 'S knows that p rather than q'. This is in contrast to the traditional view whereby knowledge attributions have a binary structure of the form 'S...

 has been proposed by Jonathan Schaffer
Jonathan Schaffer
Jonathan Schaffer is an American philosopher specializing in Metaphysics and Epistemology.Since earning his PhD. from Rutgers in 1999, Schaffer has published 37 papers. He wrote his dissertation - "Causation and the Probabilities of Processes" - under Brian McLaughin. David Lewis served as...

. Contrastivism
Contrastivism
Contrastivism is an epistemological theory proposed by Jonathan Schaffer that suggests that knowledge attributions have a ternary structure of the form 'S knows that p rather than q'. This is in contrast to the traditional view whereby knowledge attributions have a binary structure of the form 'S...

, like contextualism, uses semantic approaches to tackle the problem of skepticism.

Experimental Research

Recent work in the new field of experimental philosophy
Experimental philosophy
Experimental philosophy is an emerging field of philosophical inquiry that makes use of empirical data—often gathered through surveys which probe the intuitions of ordinary people—in order to inform research on philosophical questions This use of empirical data is widely seen as opposed to a...

 has taken an empirical approach to testing the claims of contextualism and related views. This research has proceeded by conducting experiments in which ordinary non-philosophers are presented with vignettes which involve a knowledge ascription. Participants are then asked to report on the status of that knowledge ascription. The studies address contextualism by varying the context of the knowledge ascription, e.g., how important it is that the agent in the vignette has accurate knowledge.

In the studies completed up to this point, no support for contextualism has been found. This critique of contextualism can be summed up as: stakes have no impact on evidence. More specifically, non-philosophical intuitions about knowledge attributions are not affected by the importance to the potential knower of the accuracy of that knowledge. Some may argue that these empirical studies for the most part have not been well designed for testing contextualism, which claims that the context of the attributor of "knowledge" affects the epistemic standards that govern their claims. Because most of the empirical studies don't vary the stakes for the attributor, but for the subject being described, these studies are more relevant to the evaluation of John Hawthorne's "Subject-Sensitive Invariantism" or Jason Stanley's "Interest-Relative Invariantism"--views on which the stakes for the putative subject of knowledge can affect whether that subject knows—than they are of contextualism. However, Feltz & Zarpentine (forthcoming) have tested the stakes for both the subject and the attributor, and the results are not in keeping with contextualism. Experimental work continues to be done on this topic.

See also

  • Perspectivism
    Perspectivism
    Perspectivism is the philosophical view developed by Friedrich Nietzsche that all ideations take place from particular perspectives. This means that there are many possible conceptual schemes, or perspectives in which judgment of truth or value can be made...

  • Phronetic social science
    Phronetic social science
    Phronetic social science is an approach to the study of social – including political and economic – phenomena based on a contemporary interpretation of the Aristotelian concept phronesis, variously translated as practical judgment, common sense, or prudence. Phronesis is the intellectual virtue...

  • Anekantavada
    Anekantavada
    ' is one of the most important and fundamental doctrines of Jainism. It refers to the principles of pluralism and multiplicity of viewpoints, the notion that truth and reality are perceived differently from diverse points of view, and that no single point of view is the complete truth.Jains...

  • Multi-valued logic
    Multi-valued logic
    In logic, a many-valued logic is a propositional calculus in which there are more than two truth values. Traditionally, in Aristotle's logical calculus, there were only two possible values for any proposition...

  • False dilemma
    False dilemma
    A false dilemma is a type of logical fallacy that involves a situation in which only two alternatives are considered, when in fact there are additional options...

  • Principle of Bivalence
    Principle of bivalence
    In logic, the semantic principle of bivalence states that every declarative sentence expressing a proposition has exactly one truth value, either true or false...

  • Exclusive disjunction
    Exclusive disjunction
    The logical operation exclusive disjunction, also called exclusive or , is a type of logical disjunction on two operands that results in a value of true if exactly one of the operands has a value of true...

  • Degrees of truth
  • Fuzzy logic
    Fuzzy logic
    Fuzzy logic is a form of many-valued logic; it deals with reasoning that is approximate rather than fixed and exact. In contrast with traditional logic theory, where binary sets have two-valued logic: true or false, fuzzy logic variables may have a truth value that ranges in degree between 0 and 1...

  • Logical disjunction
    Logical disjunction
    In logic and mathematics, a two-place logical connective or, is a logical disjunction, also known as inclusive disjunction or alternation, that results in true whenever one or more of its operands are true. E.g. in this context, "A or B" is true if A is true, or if B is true, or if both A and B are...

  • Logical value
    Logical value
    In logic and mathematics, a truth value, sometimes called a logical value, is a value indicating the relation of a proposition to truth.In classical logic, with its intended semantics, the truth values are true and false; that is, classical logic is a two-valued logic...

  • Propositional logic
  • Relativism
    Relativism
    Relativism is the concept that points of view have no absolute truth or validity, having only relative, subjective value according to differences in perception and consideration....

  • Rhizome (philosophy)
    Rhizome (philosophy)
    Rhizome is a philosophical concept developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their Capitalism and Schizophrenia project...

  • Epistemology at Wikiversity

External links

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