Does 'knowing' change depending on who is asking and where?
In short: In a cafe with friends, you know your hands exist. In a philosophy seminar, that certainty vanishes. This isn't a psychological trick; it might be a linguistic reality called contextualism. It suggests that the very meaning of words like 'knows' shifts based on our surroundings.
Contextualism is a family of philosophical views asserting that expressions—including actions, utterances, and concepts like "knowing" or "being true"—can only be understood relative to their specific context. In epistemology, this means the word 'knows' is context-sensitive. It functions similarly to indexicals like 'I', 'here', or 'now'; while the linguistic meaning of 'I' remains constant, the person it refers to changes depending on who is speaking.
This framework was popularized in the late 20th century as a strategic defense against skepticism. Skeptics argue that because we cannot rule out being "brains in a vat," we cannot know ordinary facts like having hands. Contextualists respond by arguing that while we might lack knowledge in a high-standard skeptical context, we possess it in an everyday conversational context. The truth value of the statement 'I know I have hands' depends on the standards selected by the speaker's current environment.
The debate centers on what actually varies. Contextualists argue it is a semantic thesis about how English works, not necessarily a theory of what knowledge consists of. However, rivals like Subject-Sensitive Invariantism (SSI) and Interest-Relative Invariantism (IRI) challenge this by suggesting that standards are determined by the subject's internal state or practical interests rather than the speaker's context. Furthermore, experimental philosophy studies up to 2010 failed to find empirical support for contextualism, showing that non-philosophers' intuitions about knowledge aren't affected by how important the information is.
Beyond logic, contextualism appears in other fields. In architecture, it involves harmonizing modern buildings with traditional urban forms across cultural and ecological dimensions. In mental health, "functional contextualism" is used to frame disorders as dynamic interactions between individual vulnerabilities and environmental stressors, moving away from reductionist models toward system-sensitive interventions.
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Sources
- Summary by Intellect · source: Contextualism
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