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- Jérôme Dokic (2006). From Linguistic Contextualism to Situated Cognition: The Case of Ad Hoc Concepts. Philosophical Psychology 19 (3):309 – 328.Our utterances are typically if not always "situated," in the sense that they are true or false relative to unarticulated parameters of the extra-linguistic context. The problem is to explain how these parameters are determined, given that nothing in the uttered sentences indicates them. It is tempting to claim that they must be determined at the level of thought or intention. However, as many philosophers have observed, thoughts themselves are no less situated than utterances. Unarticulated parameters need not be mentally represented. In this paper, I try to make precise the notion of representation at stake here. In one sense of 'representation', something is represented if it is inferentially relevant. In another, less demanding sense, something is represented if it is relevant to the construction of a context-sensitive, ad hoc concept. Ad hoc concepts act as "proxies" for cognitively more demanding representations. They "imitate" the latter's epistemic and pragmatic roles while being inferentially less sophisticated. Thus, there are two senses in which a thought can be said to be situated: (1) its truth-value is relative to a non-represented contextual parameter, (2) its truth-value is not itself relative, but it involves a context-sensitive, ad hoc concept.Reading list | Discuss | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Contextualist theories of knowledge offer a semantic hypothesis to explain the observed contextual variation in what people say they know, and the difficulty people have resolving skeptical paradoxes. Subject or speaker relative versions make the truth conditions of “S knows that p” depend on the standards of either the knower’s context (Hawthorne and Stanley) or those of the speaker’s context (Cohen and DeRose). Speaker contextualism avoids objections to subject contextualism, but is implausible in light of evidence that “know” does not behave like an indexical. I deepen and extend these criticisms in light of recent defenses by contextualists (including Ludlow). Another difficulty is that whether certain standards are salient or intended does not entail that they are the proper standards. A normative form of contextualism on which the truth of a knowledge claim depends on the proper standards for the context is more promising, but still unsatisfactory whether the view is speaker or subject relative. I defend alternative explanations for the observed linguistic and psychological data: a pragmatic account for some cases and a cognitive account for others. 1.
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| | Other links: springerlink.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... David Lewis, Stewart Cohen, and Keith DeRose have proposed that sentences of the form S knows P are indexical, and therefore differ in truth value from one context to another.1 On their indexical contextualism, the truth value of S knows P is determined by whether S meets the epistemic standards of the speakers context. I will not be concerned with relational forms of contextualism, according to which the truth value of S knows P is determined by the standards of the subject Ss context, regardless of the standards applying to the speaker making the knowledge claim. Relational contextualism is a form of normative relativism. Indexical contextualism is a semantic theory. When the subject is the speaker, as when S is the first person pronoun I, the two forms of contextualism coincide. But otherwise, they diverge. I critically examine the principal arguments for indexicalism, detail linguistic evidence against it, and suggest a pragmatic alternative.
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| | Other links: jstor.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Contextualism in epistemology is the doctrine that the proposition expressed by a knowledge attribution relative to a context is determined in part by the standards of justification salient in that context. The (non-skeptical) contextualist allows that in some context c, a speaker may truly attribute knowledge at a time of a proposition p to Hannah, despite her possession of only weak inductive evidence for the truth of that proposition. Relative to another context, someone may make the very same knowledge attribution to Hannah, yet be speaking falsely, because the epistemic standards in that context are higher. The reason this is possible, according to the contextualist, is that the two knowledge attributions express different propositions.
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| | Other links: springerlink.com hdl.handle.net dx.doi.org rci.rutgers.edu jstor.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Over the years, several philosophers have argued that deontic modals, like ‘ought’ and ‘should’ in English, and their closest equivalents in other languages, are systematically polysemous and context-sensitive. Specifically, one way in which these ‘ought’-concepts differ from each other is that some of these concepts are more “objective”, while others are more “subjective” or “information-relative”: when ‘ought’ expresses one of these more objective concepts, what an agent “ought” to do in a given situation may be determined by facts that neither the agent nor any of his friends and advisers either knows or is even in a position to know; when it expresses one of the more “subjective” concepts, what an agent “ought” to do is in some way more sensitive to the informational state that the agent (or his friends and advisers) find themselves in at the conversationally salient time. This essay first presents some linguistic evidence in favour of this view of ‘ought’, and then proposes a precise account of the truth-conditions of propositions involving these ‘ought’-concepts that will explain more clearly how exactly these concepts are related.
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| | Other links: users.ox.ac.uk usc.edu | Scholar | More options ... In this chapter I plan to situate the concept of situated cognition within the framework of antecedent philosophical work. My intention, however, is not to provide a simple historical guide but to suggest that there are still some untapped resources in these past philosophers that may serve to enrich current accounts of situated cognition.
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| | Scholar | More options ... Recent work in relevance-theoretic pragmatics develops the idea that understanding verbal utterances involves processes of ad hoc concept construction. The resulting concepts may be narrower or looser than the lexical concepts which provide the input to the process. Two of the many issues that arise are considered in this paper: (a) the applicability of the idea to the understanding of metaphor, and (b) the extent to which lexical forms are appropriately thought of as encoding concepts.
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| | Scholar | At my library | More options ... In this paper, we put forward a position we call “situationalism” (or “situated minimalism”), which is a middle-ground view between minimalism and contextualism in recent philosophy of language. We focus on the notion of free enrichment, which first arose within contextualism as underlying the claim that what is said is typically enriched relative to the logical form of the uttered sentence. However, minimalism also acknowledges some process of pragmatic intrusion in its claim that what is thought and communicated is typically enriched relative to what is said. We show that situationalism dispenses with free enrichment both at the level of what is said (proposition expressed) and of what is thought (mental level). According to situationalism, an alleged underdetermined utterance can, pace minimalism, be true in one situation while false in another, and two people using the same alleged underdetermined sentence can be characterized, pace contextualism, as having said the same thing.
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| | Other links: springerlink.com dx.doi.org | Scholar | At my library | More options ... Discussion of Jérôme Dokic, From linguistic contextualism to situated cognition: The case of ad hoc concepts
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