Contextualism in Philosophy: Knowledge, Meaning, and Truth - Softcover

This collection is an excellent resource for anyone interested in the relevance of context to certain central areas of epistemological and/or linguistic debate. It contains eleven original essays by an impressive list of authors, including several essays that are quickly becoming quite well known. Between them, the papers cover a wide and representative range of arguments, issues and positions arising in connection with the prospects for and problems facing contextualism. (Mind)

These essays are all concerned to some degree with the extent to which, and the ways in which, the truth conditions of sentences are context dependent ... The topics range from epistemic contextualism to linguistic compositionality and semantic presupposition ... The collection is ... interesting and profitably read. (Wayne A. Davis, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews)

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.