Anthropological semantics

Contextualism describes a collection of views in philosophy which emphasize the context in which an action, utterance, or expression occurs, and argues that, in some important respect, the action, utterance, or expression can only be understood relative to that context. Contextualist views hold that philosophically controversial concepts, such as "meaning P", "knowing that P", "having a reason to A", and possibly even "being true" or "being right" only have meaning relative to a specified context. Some philosophers hold that context-dependence may lead to relativism; nevertheless, contextualist views are increasingly popular within philosophy.

In ethics, "contextualist" views are often closely associated with situational ethics, or with moral relativism.

In architectural theory, contextualism is a theory of design wherein modern (not be confused with modernism) building types are harmonized with urban forms usual to a traditional city.

In epistemology, contextualism is the treatment of the word 'knows' as context-sensitive. Context-sensitive expressions are ones that "express different propositions relative to different contexts of use". For example, some terms that are relatively uncontroversially considered context-sensitive are indexicals, such as 'I', 'here', and 'now'. While the word 'I' has a constant linguistic meaning in all contexts of use, whom it refers to varies with context. Similarly, epistemic contextualists argue that the word 'knows' is context sensitive, expressing different relations in some different contexts.

Contextualism was introduced, in part, in order to undermine skeptical arguments that have this basic structure:

Contextualist solution is not to deny any premise, nor to say that the argument does not follow, but link the truth value of (3) to the context, and say that we can refuse (3) in context—like everyday conversational context—where we have different requirements to say we know.

The main tenet of contextualist epistemology, no matter what account of knowledge it is wedded to, is that knowledge attributions are context-sensitive. Then the truth values of out term "know" depend on the context in which it is used . We can realize that in the context in which the standards to claim truthfully knowledge are so high—e. e., in skeptical context—if we said something like 'I know that I have hands' then this statement would be false. Nevertheless, if we utter the same proposition in an ordinary context—e.g., in a cafe with friends--, where lower standards are in place , the statement would be truth, even more, it's negation would be false. So, only when we participate in philosophical discourses of the skeptical sort, do we seem to lose our knowledge. However, once we leave the skeptical context, we can truthfully say we have knowledge.

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