The category of the economic value should be considered in different dimensions. The author is presenting the problem of contextualism in economic studies in reference to works of S. Amsterdamski, E. Fromm, T.S. Kuhn, B. Malinowski, R.E. Nisbett, M. Strathern and M. Weber.
PL
Kategoria wartości ekonomicznej powinna być rozważana w różnych wymiarach. Powołując się na prace S. Amsterdamskiego, E. Fromma, T.S. Kuhna, B. Malinowskiego, R.E. Nisbetta, M. Stratherna i M. Webera, autor podejmuje problem kontekstualizmu w naukach ekonomicznych.
According to contextualism a basic feature of (all) sentences is that their semantic content is not determined purely on the basis of semantic conventions and compositionality. In determining the meaning (use) of a sentence the context of use should also play a role, and that even when the sentence does not include indexical expressions. In this paper there is a critical analysis of the contextualist argumentation in favour of the claim that the meaning of predicates (or rather their use) is dependent on context. It is argued that (i) in many uses the meaning of the predicate is the only factor which determines the corresponding semantic conventions, and that (ii) the context of use usually plays a different role it does not lend extra ingredients to the expressed meaning, but only serves as the background for determining the truth-values of a given use of the sentence.
The use-mention distinction is considered as a fundamental concept in the philosophy of language. So it goes without doubt that a comprehensive theory of language has to account for this distinction. In this paper I explore what it means to account for such a distinction and I argue that the main ideas of contextualist theories of language are in conflict with the distinction in question.
In my article I reconstruct the main threads of Robert Stalnaker’s book Our Knowledge of the Internal World, which focuses on the problem of our epistemic relation to our experience and the relation between experience and knowledge. First, the book proposes an interesting view of externalism, which combines classical externalist claims with a contextualist approach to content ascriptions. The approach accommodates some important internalist intuitions by showing how content ascriptions can be sensitive to the perspective from which a subject perceives the world. Second, Stalnaker proposes a theory of selflocating and phenomenal knowledge, which should be understood in terms of differentiating between real possibilities. The puzzling upshot of this elegant solution is that it commits one to the existence of possibilities accessible only from the first-person perspective. Finally, Stalnaker presents an argument which shows that our knowledge about our phenomenal experience is no more direct than the knowledge about external objects. Stalnaker’s claim that by merely having an experience we don’t learn any new information seems, however, too strict in light of his contextualist approach to content ascriptions.
In this paper, I defend a contextualist account of the role of authors’ intentions in interpretation, according to which their role depends on readers’ interpretive interests. In light of a general discussion of intentions and responsibility, I argue that insofar as readers are interested in attributing authorial responsibility for interpretations of fictional works, authors’ intentions need to play a central role in those interpretations. And I investigate the implications of this account for ‘accidental authorship’, cases in which interpretations of a work are neither intended nor reasonably foreseen by the author.
Inclusive nonindexical context-dependence occurs when the preferred interpretation of an utterance implies its lexically-derived meaning. It is argued that the corresponding processes of free or lexically mandated enrichment can be modeled as abductive inference. A form of abduction is implemented in Simple Type Theory on the basis of a notion of plausibility, which is in turn regarded a preference relation over possible worlds. Since a preordering of doxastic alternatives taken for itself only amounts to a relatively vacuous ad hoc model, it needs to be combined with a rational way of learning from new evidence. Lexicographic upgrade is implemented as an example of how an agent might revise his plausibility ordering in light of new evidence. Various examples are given how this apparatus may be used to model the contextual resolution of context-dependent or semantically incomplete utterances. The described form of abduction is limited and merely serves as a proof of concept, but the idea in general has good potential as one among many ways to build a bridge between semantics and pragmatics since inclusive context-dependence is ubiquitous.
Interpretive International Relations (IR) has become a robust and diverse research programme, consolidating across various subfields of the discipline. However, this is a recent phenomenon. While early classical realists and English School scholars clearly drew on interpretive thought, these contributions did not coalesce into a welldefined and specifically interpretive research agenda. The ‘interpretive turn’ in social sciences and humanities in the 1970s and epistemological pluralisation of political science and IR in the 1990s slowly made space for interpretive theory and research. This paper reconstructs, first, what makes interpretive IR distinct, and, second, what it means to engage in interpretive inquiry in this field, conceptually and substantively. It discusses in particular the implications of the monist ontological position that interpretivists tend to occupy and the conditions of knowledge production within the hermeneutical circle. These reject the possibility of transcending the context and bring to bear the researcher’s involvement in knowledge production as inevitable but generative. The paper also explicates the still poorly understood concept of ‘intersubjectivity’ as being defining for the interpretivist sensibility and one which directly contests positivist ideals. Interpretive IR scholarship serves as a veritable showcase for interpretive research practice, and points to the growing significance and volume of such scholarship.
In the debate between contextualism and relativism about predicates of taste, the challenge from disagreement (the objection that contextualism cannot account for disagreement in ordinary exchanges involving such predicates) has played a central role. This paper investigates one way of answering the challenge consisting on appeal to certain, less focused on, uses of predicates of taste. It argues that the said thread is unsatisfactory, in that it downplays certain exchanges that constitute the core disagreement data. Additionally, several arguments to the effect that the exchanges in question don’t amount to disagreement are considered and rejected.
In this paper, I report new empirical data on folk semantic intuitions concerning color adjectives in so-called context-shifting experiments. Contextualists present such experiments - that is, they describe different conversational contexts in which a given sentence is uttered - in order to argue that context can shape meaning and truth conditions to such a degree that competent speakers would give opposite truth evaluations of the same sentence in different contexts. The initial findings of Hansen and Chemla (2013) suggest that laypersons’ semantic judgments are sensitive to context in the same way that is predicted by contextualists. In this paper, I focus on context-shifting experiments that involve color adjectives; also, I present experiments that are a partial replication and methodological extension of Hansen and Chemla’s study. One aim of my study was to corroborate these authors’ findings using a bigger sample (total N = 1128), but the main goal was to test the stability of results in different methodological variants of empirical adaptations of context-shifting experiments. This part of the study addresses the issues pointed out in my earlier paper (Ziółkowski 2017), where I argued that certain experimental settings (within-subjects) might bring data that is more favorable to contextualism than other settings (between-subjects). My study compares three different experimental settings: within-subjects (with randomized order of context presentation), between-subjects (where participants evaluating different contexts aredistinct groups), and “contrastive design” (where both contexts are presented side by side on the same screen). My results are highly consistent across the methodological variants I employed, but while they show some of the effects expected by contextualists, it is disputable whether they bring strong support to contextualism with respect to color adjectives.
My aim in this paper is to amend the Stalnakerian view of context in such a way that it can allow for an adequate treatment of a contextualist position regarding the Liar Paradox. I discuss Glanzberg’s contextualism and the reason why his position cannot be encompassed by the Stalnakerian view, as it is normally construed. Finally, I introduce the phenomenon I call “semantic dissonance”, followed by a mechanism accommodating the Stalnakerian view to the demands of Glanzberg’s contextualism.
It is sometimes claimed that semantic theories can be assessed as correct in isolation, i.e. regardless of their connections with theories that concern other areas. The present paper offers a counter-example to this thesis that concerns predicates of taste (such as “tasty”, “funny”, “scary”), their semantics and application. It is argued that once one adopts a particular analysis of taste properties that reduces them to relational properties capturing the external stimulation and the recipient’s reaction, the most suitable kind of semantic theory should treat predicates of taste as indexical expressions of a sort. It is further shown that the indexical nature of predicates of taste can be preserved by contextualist theories and violated by relativist theories. It follows that once one opts for a certain analysis of taste properties one should adopt a certain kind of semantic theory.
According to Kaplan’s bidimensional theory of demonstratives, the descriptive content of any indexical term (and the sentences they appear in) is only employed to determine its reference in any possible world rigidly but cannot be expressed by the sentence’s truth conditions. Kaplan then argues that an indexical sentence’s informativeness depends on what he calls its character, a property of the context that relates a particular context to a concrete content, but it cannot be a part of the proposition the sentence entertains (its content), primarily given the logical inconsistencies the opposite would show in the theory of conditionals and counterfactuals. I agree with Kaplan that indexicals should not be considered disguised descriptions. Nevertheless, I believe that their content is informative and, therefore, part of the proposition these sentences express, even though that implies accepting the existence of content shifting operators within the same context --what Kaplan dubbed monsters. This paper, therefore, presents an alternative account to indexical terms and sentences employing the Interactive Theory introduced in Colomina-Alminana (2022). This approach considers that the meaning of any sentence, the proposition it expresses, depends upon three interrelated factors: the speaker’s intentions when uttering, the audience’s potential uptakes of such statement, and the conventions established by the speech community both speaker and audience belong, or the linguistic interaction takes place. The critical element is the so-called speaker's point of view, an objective perspectival networking background that allows lexical and syntactic mechanisms to trigger and update potential conceptual presuppositional content shared by both speaker and audience and whose existence is prior to any context and circumstances.
How should we understand Wittgenstein's proposals that "the meaning of a word is its use in the language" (Wittgenstein 1953, §43) and that a name only has a meaning in a language-game (ibid. §49)? Are they incompatible with occasion-invariant semantics? In this paper I present two leading interpretations of Wittgenstein's contextualism: James Conant's meaning-eliminativism (ME) and Charles Travis's meaning-underdetermination (MU). I argue that, even though these two interpretations are very similar, the latter gives a more nuanced account of Wittgenstein's contextualism which does not involve a commitment to the claim that words have no meaning outside immediate contexts of use.
Very few philosophers and linguists doubt that definite descriptions have attributive uses and referential uses. The point of disagreement concerns whether the difference in uses is grounded on a difference in meaning. The Ambiguity Theory holds while the Implicature Theory denies that definite descriptions are ambiguous expressions, having an attributive meaning and a referential meaning. Contextualists have attempted to steer between the Ambiguity Theory and the Implicature Theory. I claim that the early contextualist account provided by Recanati and Bezuidehnout based on the idea that definite descriptions are semantically underdetermined and in need of a completion from the contextually available information through an optional top-down pragmatic process suffers from an explanatory gap.
The present essay aims to contribute to the contemporary debate on what the most appropriate approach for political historiography is. In it, three approaches are outlined as the most influential and widespread today: philosophico-methodological historicism, contextualism, and the paradigmatic approach. The paradigmatic approach is investigated with respect to its nature, contents and heuristic parameters, and the legitimacy of its application is explained. The defining feature of this approach is that it presents the development of political thought as a progressive three-stage dialectical and logical process of “overcoming” the “outdated” and establishing new paradigms. The implementation of the paradigmatic approach in political historiography allows the coming of new political doctrines to be seen as the expression of the requirements set by the existing political paradigm in a given historical period and not as the effect of chance or divine inspiration.
The author’s aim is to analyse the problem of criticism in the context of political sciences, in particular in the context of political philosophy. The issue is considered in the light of two basic epistemological standpoints: contextualism and presentism. These two approaches are often regarded as mutually exclusive; however, the author presents arguments for their possible complementarity and demonstrates that their concurrence is the necessary point of departure for critical attitudes in political philosophy.
In the present paper I present the metalinguistic solutions to the ‘lost disagreement’ problem proposed (independently) Sundell and Plunkett [2013] and Barker [2012]. I argue that metalinguistic negotiations about taste, even though successful in explaining the intuition of disagreement in a vast number of cases, are not an accurate solution to the disagreement problem in contextualism when it comes to the most paradigmatic case of “tasty”. I also argue against the account of faultless disagreement explained via vagueness of taste predicates [Barker, 2012]. I believe that the notion of faultlessness employed in the discussion of vagueness [Wright, 1994] is a different notion than the one employed in the discussion of taste discourse [Kölbel, 2003].
Celem niniejszej pracy jest przedstawienie różnych prób wyjaśnienia, dlaczego argumenty sceptyczne mają dużą siłę przekonywania, a przy tym ich konkluzja wydaje się niemożliwa do przyjęcia. Zaproponuję przy tym własną diagnozę takiego stanu rzeczy, która odwołuje się do wyników badań w ramach filozofii eksperymentalnej wskazujących na istnienie takiego rodzaju wiedzy, która nie pociąga za sobą odpowiedniego przekonania.
EN
The aim of this paper is to present various answers to the skeptical argument and propose an alternative solution. Suggested solution refers to the results of empirical research which lead to abandonment of entailment thesis concerning knowledge. My answer is contextualist inasmuch as it recognizes the existence of different concepts of knowledge. The applicability of these concepts depends on the situation; in a skeptical context the concept of knowledge is not accompanied by appropriate belief, and in ordinary contexts knowledge requires a belief of specific content.
Semantic contextualism is often used in order to offer solutions for problems in other branches of philosophy, including epistemology. One of such attempts is epistemic contextualism, according to which the semantic value of the word “knows” changes with the context of its utterance. The aim of this paper is to critically investigate Keith DeRose’s contextualism to see up to what extent does it provide a valid anti-sceptical strategy. I argue that while it can be seen as a good rival for global and Ungerian scepticism, it does not lead to the refutation of other variants of classical scepticism.
PL
Teoria kontekstualizmu semantycznego, chociaż pierwotnie jest to teoria z dziedziny filozofii języka, bywa często wykorzystywana jako element strategii rozwiązywania problemów w pozostałych dziedzinach filozofii, w tym epistemologii. Wedle kontekstualizmu epistemologicznego, znaczenie słowa „wiem” zmienia się wraz z kontekstem jego wypowiedzenia. Celem tego artykułu jest krytyczna analiza kontekstualizmu Keitha DeRose’a w celu sprawdzenia do jakiego stopnia dostarcza on dobrej strategii antysceptyckiej. Argumentuję, że pomimo, iż teoria ta jest dobrym rywalem dla sceptycyzmu globalnego i Ungerowskiego, przyjęcie jej nie prowadzi jednak do odrzucenia innych wariantów klasycznego sceptycyzmu.
Celem niniejszej pracy jest przedstawienie różnych prób wyjaśnienia, dlaczego argumenty sceptyczne mają dużą siłę przekonywania, a przy tym ich konkluzja wydaje się niemożliwa do przyjęcia. Zaproponuję przy tym własną diagnozę takiego stanu rzeczy, która odwołuje się do wyników badań w ramach filozofii eksperymentalnej wskazujących na istnienie takiego rodzaju wiedzy, która nie pociąga za sobą odpowiedniego przekonania.
EN
The aim of this paper is to present various answers to the skeptical argument and propose an alternative solution. Suggested solution refers to the results of empirical research which lead to abandonment of entailment thesis concerning knowledge. My answer is contextualist inasmuch as it recognizes the existence of different concepts of knowledge. The applicability of these concepts depends on the situation; in a skeptical context the concept of knowledge is not accompanied by appropriate belief, and in ordinary contexts knowledge requires a belief of specific content.
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