Contextualism in Philosophy: Knowledge, Meaning, and Truth

Description

In epistemology and in philosophy of language there is fierce debate about the role of context in knowledge, understanding, and meaning. Many contemporary epistemologists take seriously the thesis that epistemic vocabulary is context-sensitive. This thesis is of course a semantic claim, so it has brought epistemologists into contact with work on context in semantics by philosophers of language. This volume brings together the debates, in a set of twelve specially written essays representing the latest work by leading figures in the two fields. All future work on contextualism will start here. Contents Contributors 1 Introduction: The Limits of Contextualism Part I: Contextualism in Epistemology 2 Contextualism and the New Linguistic Turn in Epistemology 3 The Emperor’s New ‘Knows’ 4 Knowledge, Context, and the Agent’s Point of View 5 What Shifts? Thresholds, Standards, or Alternatives? 6 Epistemic Modals in Context Part II: Compositionality, Meaning, and Context 7 Literalism and Contextualism: Some Varieties 8 A Tall Tale: In Defense of Semantic Minimalism and Speech Act Pluralism 9 Semantics in Context 10 Meaning before Truth 11 Compositionality and Context 12 Presuppositions, Truth Values, and Expressing Propositions Index A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Z