Contextualism in philosophy of language and in epistemology are two distinct but closely entangled projects. The epistemological thesis is grounded in a semantic claim concerning the context-sensitivity of the predicate “know”: we gain insight into epistemological problems by investigating our linguistic intuitions concerning knowledge attribution sentences. Our aim here is to evaluate the plau...

The Henriques' article, "Psychology Defined" (this issue), reflects an underlying philosophy of science that emphasizes coherence as its truth criterion. The taxonomic efforts that result are of unknown value when viewed from other philosophical positions. From the point of view of functional contextualism, the primary metric of successful science is not coherence per se, but the precision, sco...

This article critiques major trends in the psychotherapy integration movement from the postmodern perspectives of contextualism and pluralism. A contextualist position asserts that psychotherapeutic concepts and interventions can be understood only within the linguistic, theoretical, and ideological frameworks in which they are embedded. Therefore, they take on new meanings when extracted from ...

This paper is driven by the idea that the contextualism-relativism debate regarding the semantics of value-attributions turns upon certain extra-semantic assumptions that are unwarranted. One is the assumption that the many-place predicate of truth, deployed by compositional semantics, cannot be directly appealed to in theorizing about people's assessments of truth value, but must be supplement...

The paper explicates a new way to model the context-sensitivity of ‘knows’, viz. a way that suggests a close connection between the content of ‘knows’ in a context C and what is pragmatically presupposed in C. After explicating my new approach in the first half of the paper and arguing that it is explanatorily superior to standard accounts of epistemic contextualism, the paper points, in its se...