Contextualistic Mechanism or Mechanistic Contextualism?: The Straw Machine As Tar Baby

Contextualism in Behavior Analysis of Development: upon Further Reflection

The notion that contextualism has evolved as an alternative to organismic and mechanistic metamodels or world views of human development has received much attention in psychology during the last few years (e.g, Reese, 1991), In behavior analysis, there has been enormous discussion and debate over the questions of whether behavior analysis is mechanistic or contextualistic (e.g., Marr, 1993a, 19...

Perspectives on Possibilities : Contextualism , Relativism , or What ?

Epistemic possibilities are relative to bodies of information, or perspectives. To claim that something is epistemically possible is typically to claim that it is possible relative one’s own current perspective. We generally do this by using bare, unqualified epistemic possibility (EP) sentences, ones that don’t mention our perspective. The fact that epistemic possibilities are relative to pers...

Post-cartesian Psychoanalysis as Phenomenological Contextualism

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...

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...