In epistemology and in philosophy of language there is fierce debate about the role of context in knowledge, understanding, and meaning. Many contemporary epistemologists take seriously the thesis that epistemic vocabulary is context-sensitive. This thesis is of course a semantic claim, so it has brought epistemologists into contact with work on context in semantics by philosophers of language. This volume brings together the debates, in a set of twelve specially written essays representing the latest work by leading figures in the two fields. All future work on contextualism will start here.
Contents/sample on publisher's homepage
Gerhard Preyer, Georg Peter
Introduction: The Limitation of Contextualism
Contextualism and the New Linguistic Turn in Epistemology
Peter Ludlow
The Emperor's 'New Knows'
Kent Bach
Knowledge, Context and the Agent's Point of View
Timothy Williamson
What Shifts? Thresholds, Standards, or Alternatives?
Jonathan Schaffer
Epistemic Modals in Context
Andy Egan, John Hawthorne, Brian Weatherson
Literalism and Contextualism: Some Varieties
François Recanati
A Tall Tale In Defense of Semantic Minimalism and Speech Act Pluralism
Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore
Semantics in Context
Jason Stanley
Meaning before Truth
Paul M. Pietroski
Compositionality and Context
Peter Pagin
Presuppositions, Truth Values, and Expressing Propositions
Michael Glanzberg
Index
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Oxford University Press: Oxford 2005, 402 pages