Contextualist resolutions of philosophical debates
Metaphilosophy 39 (4-5):571-590 (2008)
| Abstract | Abstract: Despite all the critical scrutiny they have received recently, contextualist views in philosophy are still not well understood. Neither contextualists nor their opponents have been entirely clear about what contextualist theses amount to and what they are based on. In this article I show that there are actually two kinds of contextualist view that rest on two very different semantic phenomena, namely, semantic incompleteness and semantic indeterminacy . I explain how contextualist approaches can be used to dissolve certain debates in philosophy. According to such approaches, the same philosophical thesis can be correctly endorsed in some contexts and correctly denied in others: it is thus pointless to seek a context-independent solution to debates about this thesis. My purpose is not to defend particular contextualist views but to lay out the general framework on which they rest: this allows us to see more clearly the similarities and differences among contextualist views defended in various areas of philosophy. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,679 |
| External links |
 |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesJosef Stern (2006). Metaphor, Literal, Literalism. Mind and Language 21 (3):243–279.
Michael Hughes (2013). Problems for Contrastive Closure: Resolved and Regained. Philosophical Studies 163 (3):577-590.
Stefano Predelli (2005). Painted Leaves, Context, and Semantic Analysis. Linguistics and Philosophy 28 (3):351 - 374.
Maja Malec (2009). Essentialism Contextualized. Croatian Journal of Philosophy 9 (2):201-217.
John Fennell (2013). “The Meaning of 'Meaning is Normative' ”. Philosophical Investigations 36 (1):56-78.
Ram Neta (2002). S Knows That P. Noûs 36 (4):663–681.
Ishani Maitra (2007). How and Why to Be a Moderate Contextualist. In Gerhard Preyer & Georg Peter (eds.), Context Sensitivity and Semantic Minimalism: New Essays on Semantics and Pragmatics. Oxford University Press.
D. Pritchard (2002). Two Forms of Epistemological Contextualism. Grazer Philosophische Studien 64 (1):19-55.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-01-28Total downloads25 ( #49,599 of 549,087 )Recent downloads (6 months)1 ( #63,317 of 549,087 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
