Metaethical Contextualism

Metaethical Contextualism Defended -Ethics format 7-7-10

Contextualism and Conceptual Disambiguation

I distinguish between Old Contextualism, New Contextualism, and the Multiple Concepts Theory. I argue that Old Contextualism cannot handle the following three problems: (i) the disquotational paradox, (ii) upward pressure resistance, (iii) inability to avoid the acceptance of skeptical conclusions. New Contextualism, in contrast, can avoid these problems. However, since New Contextualism appear...

Lexical Contextualism: The Abélard Syndrome

The term contextualism is used in linguistics to refer to approaches that are based on the following credo: linguistic entities cannot be considered outside contexts of use as it is only in context that they do make sense. Contextualism has always existed (at least, since antiquity) and it does not correspond to a uniform approach to language studies. It is however striking that much resonance ...

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...

From Contextualism to Contrastivism

Contextualism treats ‘knows’ as an indexical that denotes different epistemic properties in different contexts. Contrastivism treats ‘knows’ as denoting a ternary relation with a slot for a contrast proposition. I will argue that contrastivism resolves the main philosophical problems of contextualism, by employing a better linguistic model. Contextualist insights are best understood by contrast...