Context, Truth, and Objectivity: Essays on Radical Contextualism. A Book Review

Contextualism, Skepticism and Objectivity

In this paper, I try to make sense of the idea that true knowledge attributions characterize something that is more valuable than true belief and that survives even if, as Contextualism implies, contextual changes make it no longer identifiable by a knowledge attribution. I begin by sketching a familiar, pragmatic picture of assertion that helps us to understand and predict how the words “S kno...

Review Essays and Book Reviews

In her engaging and useful book, Accounting for Profit for Breach of Contract: Theory and Practice, Katy Barnett presents a theory of disgorgement damages for breach of contract. This is a welcome publication, as disgorgement damages continue to present both theoretical and practical puzzles for the law of contract, and Barnett makes a valuable contribution to this important topic. By way of ba...

Radical Contextualism

Philosophers inspired by Wittgenstein have been waging a guerrilla war against compositional, truth-conditional semantics (CTCS) since the rise to dominance of that approach to the study of meaning in the early 1970s. The neo-Wittgensteinian resistance involves two elements: first, a focus on the way our assessment of the truth conditions of sentences changes in various, seemingly open-ended wa...

Truth Wronged: Crispin Wright's Truth and Objectivity

Truth-Theoretic Contextualism: Dissolving the Minimalism/Contextualism Debate

INTRODUCTION The scope of the research field of semantics seems to shrink in the recent debate between the viewpoints of contextualism and (semantic) minimalism. Minimalists hold that semantics is the formal endeavour that derives a minimal proposition from the syntactically structured input string. This semantic content is then fed to the subsequent pragmatic module in which meaning is supplem...