Contextualism as representationalism?

Post-cartesian Psychoanalysis as Phenomenological Contextualism

Metaethical Contextualism

An important function of language is to create and develop interpersonal relationships in communication. In inquiry we share and coordinate our beliefs about how the world is. But we also take a stance and socially orient ourselves toward possible acts, attitudes, and states of affairs. We evaluate possibilities as desirable, appropriate, horrible, trivial, permissible, wonderful. We make deman...

Coreference and Representationalism

The compositional interpretation of structures in discourse has raised the question whether some level of representation is indispensable in the analysis of the semantics of natural language. In this paper we formulate and motivate three notions of representationalism (a strong, a medium or midweak, and a weak one) and discuss to what extent existing formal semantic frameworks qualify as (stron...

Nonindexical contextualism

Philosophers on all sides of the contextualism debates have had an overly narrow conception of what semantic context sensitivity could be. They have conflated context sensitivity (dependence of truth or extension on features of context) with indexicality (dependence of content on features of context). As a result of this conflation, proponents of contextualism have taken arguments that establis...

Representationalism and Husserlian Phenomenology

According to contemporary representationalism, phenomenal qualia—of specifically sensory experiences—supervene on representational content. Most arguments for representationalism share a common, phenomenological premise: the so-called ‘‘transparency thesis.’’ According to the transparency thesis, it is difficult—if not impossible—to distinguish the quality or character of experiencing an object...