Contextualism

Contextualism, also asked as epistemic contextualism, is a sort of views in philosophy which emphasize the context in which an action, utterance, or expression occurs. Proponents of contextualism argue that, in some important respect, the action, utterance, or expression can only be understood relative to that context. Contextualist views defecate that philosophically controversial concepts, such(a) as "meaning P", "knowing that P", "having a reason to A", as alive as possibly even "being true" or "being right" only hit meaning relative to a referred context. Other philosophers contend that context-dependence leads to set up relativism.

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

Contextualism in architecture is a impression of order where innovative building rank are harmonized with urban forms usual to a traditional city.

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 loosely considered context-sensitive are indexicals, such(a) as 'I', 'here', and 'now'; while 'I' has a constant linguistic meaning in any contexts of use, whom it noted to varies with context. Similarly, epistemic contextualists argue that the word 'knows' is context sensitive, expressing different relations in some different contexts.

Overview

Contextualism was introduced, in part, to undermine skeptical arguments that have this basic structure:

The contextualist a object that is caused or exposed by something else is non to deny all premise, nor to say that the parameter does non follow, but link the truth advantage of 3 to the context, as well as say that we can refuse 3 in context—like everyday conversational context—where we have different standard to say we know.

The leading tenet of contextualist epistemology is that cognition attributions are context-sensitive, and the truth values of "know" depend on the context in which it is for used. A a thing that is said like 'I know that I have hands' would be false. The same proposition in an ordinary context—e.g., in a cafe with friends— would be truth, and its negation would be false. When we participate in philosophical discourses of the skeptical sort, weto lose our knowledge; once we leave the skeptical context, we can truthfully say we have knowledge.

That is, when we attribute knowledge to someone, the context in which we ownership the term 'knowledge' determines the standard relative to which "knowledge" is being attributed or denied. whether we use it in everyday conversational contexts, the contextualist maintains, most of our claims to "know" matters are true, despite skeptical attempts to show we know little or nothing. But whether 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. This opinion does not let that someone can have knowledge at oneand not the other, which would not 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 solution 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.

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' working in English, not a theory of what knowledge, justification, or strength of epistemic position consists in. However, epistemologists multiple contextualism with views about what knowledge is to consultation epistemological puzzles and issues, such as skepticism, the Gettier problem, and the Lottery paradox.

Contextualist accounts of knowledge became increasingly popular toward the end of the 20th century, especially as responses to the problem of skepticism. innovative contextualists increase Michael Blome-Tillmann, Michael Williams, Stewart Cohen, Keith DeRose, David Lewis, Gail Stine, and George Mattey.

The standards for attributing knowledge to someone, the contextualist claims, reform 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 account of knowledge can be an exemplification of contextualism if it's held that strength of justification is a contextually varying matter. And one who accepts a relevant alternative's 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 so-called 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 sufficientlypossible worlds: Knowledge amounts to there being no "nearby" worlds in which one goes wrong with respect to p. But howis 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.

It is claimed that neurophilosophy has the purpose of contextualizing.

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 2005. SSI claims that it is the context of the subject of the knowledge attribution that determines the epistemic standards, whereas Contextualism retains 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.

An pick to contextualism called contrastivism has been submitted by Jonathan Schaffer. Contrastivism, like contextualism, uses semantic approaches to tackle the problem of skepticism.

Recent[] work in experimental philosophy 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 shown with vignettes, then asked to version on the status of the knowledge ascription. The studies source 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 2010, no assistance for contextualism has been found: 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.