The original concept of epistemic dependence suggests uncritical deference to expert opinions for non-experts. In the light of recent work in science studies, however, the actual situation of epistemic dependence is seen to involve the necessary and ubiquitous need for lay evaluations of scientific experts. As expert knowledge means restricted cognitive access to some epistemic domain, lay evaluations of expert knowledge are rational and informed only when the criteria used by non-experts when judging experts are different from the (...) criteria used by experts when making their claims. The distinction between ‘substantial knowledge’ and ‘contextual knowledge’ allows for the laypeople to know with experts without having to know precisely what experts know. Such meta-expert evaluations are not specific to the public sphere outside science, nor are they limited internally to science, but they are present in a wide range of contexts in and around science. The paper legitimizes the concept of contextual knowledge by relating it to the relevant literature, and expounds the idea by identifying some elements of such a knowledge. (shrink)

Two studies tested whether observers could differentiate between two facets of pride—authentic and hubristic—on the basis of a single prototypical pride nonverbal expression combined with relevant contextual information. In Study 1, participants viewed targets displaying posed pride expressions in response to success, while causal attributions for the success (target's effort vs. ability) and the source of this information (target vs. omniscient narrator conveying objective fact) were varied. Study 2 used a similar method, but attribution information came from both the (...) target and an omniscient narrator; the congruence of these attributions was varied. Across studies, participants tended to label expressions as authentic pride, but were relatively more likely to label them as hubristic pride when (a) contextual information indicated that targets were arrogant and (b) no mitigating information about the target's potential value as a hard-working group member (i.e., that success was actually due to effort) was presented. (shrink)

How nature of scientific knowledge or nature of science and scientific inquiry are contextualized, or related to each other, significantly impacts both curriculum and classroom practice, specifically with respect to the teaching and learning of NOSK. NOS and NOSK are considered synonymous here, with NOSK more accurately conveying the meaning of the construct. Three US-based science education reform documents are used to illustrate the aforementioned impact. The USA has had three major reform documents released over a period of 20 (...) years. The Benchmarks for Science Literacy was the first in 1993, followed by the National Science Education Standards in 1996, and the newest, the Next Generation Science Standards, was released in 2013. NOS or NOSK was strongly emphasized and given a prominent position in the first two, while the NGSS has marginalized the construct. It is categorized as a set of connections that can be made to some of the Science Practices or Crosscutting Ideas. However, a careful conceptual analysis of how the NGSS positions NOSK/nos relative to the previous reform documents reveals a complex situation related to how NOSK/nos is contextualized and apparent assumptions about how NOSK/nos is best taught and learned. A historical review of how NOSK/nos is contextualized reveals a longstanding confusion concerning the relationship between NOSK/nos and SI as well as about how the reform documents seem to assume how it can be best taught to students. The assumptions often run contrary to the empirical research on the teaching and learning of NOSK as well as call into question the ability of the NGSS to promote the perennial science education goal of scientific literacy. (shrink)

Learning depends on attention. The processes that cue attention in the moment dynamically integrate learned regularities and immediate contextual cues. This paper reviews the extensive literature on cued attention and attentional learning in the adult literature and proposes that these fundamental processes are likely significant mechanisms of change in cognitive development. The value of this idea is illustrated using phenomena in children's novel word learning.

What are philosophers doing when they prescribe a particular epistemology for science? According to science and technology studies, the answer to this question implicates both knowledge and politics, even when the latter is hidden. Exploring this dynamic via a specific case, I argue that Longino’s “critical contextual empiricism” ultimately relies on a form of political liberalism. Her choice to nevertheless foreground epistemological concerns can be clarified by considering historical relationships between science and society, as well as the culture (...) of academic philosophy. This example, I conclude, challenges philosophers of science to consider the political ideals and accountability entailed by their prescribed knowledge practices. (shrink)

The anthropological approach is the central focus of this study. Laboratories are looked upon with the innocent eye of the traveller in exotic lands, and the societies found in these places are observed with the objective yet compassionate eye of the visitor from a quite other cultural milieu. There are many surprises that await us if we enter a laboratory in this frame of mind... This study is a realistic enterprise, an attempt to truly represent the social order of life (...) in laboratories and institutes of research, just as they are. By bringing the philosophical issues to the surface as matters not of prejudgement but as matters of concern, Karin Knorr-Cetina has developed the first really positive challenge to the philosophy of science since the days of paradigms and internal definitions of meanings. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: How is the Combining of Qualitative/Quantitative Methods to be Understood? ‘Critical Connections’? Problems Conceptualising and Researching Difference, Specificity and Context Complexity Theory: Redefining Order (and Chaos)? A Complexity‐Based Ontology Conceptualising Difference, Specificity and Context Conclusion Notes References.

Epistemological contextualism states that propositions about knowledge, expressed in sentences like “S knows that P,” are context-sensitive. Schaffer (2005) examines whether one of Lewis’ (1996), Cohen’s (1988) and DeRose’s (1995) influential contextualist accounts is preferable to the others. According to Schaffer, Lewis’ theory of relevant alternatives succeeds as a linguistic basis for contextualism and as an explanation of what the parameter that shifts with context is, while Cohen’s theory of thresholds and DeRose’s theory of standards fail. This paper argues (...) that Schaffer’s analysis is unsatisfactory since it fails to show that thresholds and standards cannot cope with skepticism, as it is ultimately the conversation participants who control how the conversation plays out. Moreover, Schaffer fails to show that gradability is of no importance in inquiries. (shrink)

It is now widely accepted that qualitative and quantitative research traditions, rather than being seen as opposed to or in competition with each other should be used, where appropriate, in some kind of combination. How this combining is to be understood ontologically, and therefore epistemologically, however, is not always clear. Rather than endlessly discussing the relationship between different approaches, this paper explores some of the assumptions of the ontologies that underpin such apparent differences, arguing that approaches which declare themselves to (...) be distinct theoretically are often surprisingly similar methodologically. It is argued that dominant ontologies and epistemologies struggle with the conceptualisation and representation of particularity, difference, process, interactions through time, multiple and de-centred forms of causation, and dynamic structure. Complexity/dynamic systems theory is then introduced and examined for its potential to offer the basis of a different kind of ontology: one which is able not only to accommodate these things, but which is itself based upon them. In conclusion, the implications of this perspective are discussed in relation to the problems that have been identified, particularly in relation to the conceptualisation of 'context'. (shrink)

It is now widely accepted that qualitative and quantitative research traditions, rather than being seen as opposed to or in competition with each other ( ; ) should be used, where appropriate, in some kind of combination (; ). How this combining is to be understood ontologically, and therefore epistemologically, however, is not always clear. Rather than endlessly discussing the relationship between different approaches, this paper explores some of the assumptions of the ontologies that underpin such apparent differences, arguing that (...) approaches which declare themselves to be distinct theoretically are often surprisingly similar methodologically. It is argued that dominant ontologies and epistemologies struggle with the conceptualisation and representation of particularity, difference, process, interactions through time, multiple and de‐centred forms of causation, and dynamic structure. Complexity/dynamic systems theory is then introduced and examined for its potential to offer the basis of a different kind of ontology: one which is able not only to accommodate these things, but which is itself based upon them. In conclusion, the implications of this perspective are discussed in relation to the problems that have been identified, particularly in relation to the conceptualisation of ‘context’. (shrink)

One of the most significant aspects of Internet, in comparison with other sources of information, such as libraries, books, journals, television, radio etcetera, is that it makes expert knowledge much more accessible to non‐experts than the other traditional sources. This phenomenon has often been applauded for its democratizing effects. Unfortunately, there is also a disadvantage. Expert information that was originally intended for a specific group of people ‐ and not in any way processed or adapted to make it fit (...) for a broader audience ‐ can easily be misunderstood and misinterpreted by non‐experts and, when used as a basis for decisions, lead to unhappy consequences. Can these risks be diminished without limiting the informational freedoms of the information providers and without imposing paternalistic measures regarding the receivers of the information? (shrink)

Psychology has benefited from an enormous wealth of knowledge about processes of cognition in relation to how the brain organizes information. Within the categorization literature, this behavior is often explained through theories of memory construction called exemplar theory and prototype theory which are typically based on similarity or rule functions as explanations of how categories emerge. Although these theories work well at modeling highly controlled stimuli in laboratory settings, they often perform less well outside of these settings, such as (...) explaining the emergence of background knowledge processes. In order to explain background knowledge, we present a non-similarity-based post-Skinnerian theory of human language called Relational Frame Theory which is rooted in a philosophical world view called functional contextualism. This theory offers a very different interpretation of how categories emerge through the functions of behavior and through contextual cues, which may be of some benefit to existing categorization theories. Specifically, RFT may be able to offer a novel explanation of how background knowledge arises, and we provide some mathematical considerations in order to identify a formal model. Finally, we discuss much of this work within the broader context of general semantic knowledge and artificial intelligence research. (shrink)

Leading philosophical accounts presume that Thomas H. Morgan’s transmission theory can be understood independently of experimental practices. Experimentation is taken to be relevant to confirming, rather than interpreting, the transmission theory. But the construction of Morgan’s theory went hand in hand with the reconstruction of the chief experimental object, the model organism Drosophila melanogaster . This raises an important question: when a theory is constructed to account for phenomena in carefully controlled laboratory settings, what knowledge, if any, indicates the (...) theory’s relevance to phenomena outside highly controlled settings? The answer, I argue, is found within the procedural knowledge embedded within laboratory practice. †To contact the author, please write to: Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Minnesota, Department of Philosophy, 831 Heller Hall, 271 19th Ave., University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN 55455‐0310; e‐mail: [email protected]. (shrink)

This project was undertaken to develop a telelearning knowledge base aimed at making specialized telelearning knowledge accessible to non-specialized practitioners in the field. The challenge stems from a rationale related to a user-centered approach for the software design process, which is focused on learning in the context of professional practice, the bridge to be built between expert and practitioner knowledge, as well as the knowledge valorization of the latter. In order to take into account users and (...) their situated actions, a usage study was integrated in the analysis phase. This study allows the creation of procedural and contextual telelearning models, and also lists of needs. These results serve as a basis for formulating guidelines for the development of ontologies, for the design of the telelearning knowledge base user interface and telelearning knowledge base environmental description. This paper presents the guidelines and orientations derived from these models. (shrink)

This paper responds to Stroud's important The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism. The author defends a view in which statements in a natural language have truth-evaluable content only in concrete contexts. It is argued that just what counts as a concrete possibility that must be defeated before one can say that one knows something is a highly context-sensitive matter, and that Stroud's alternative to this context-sensitive account of the way the verb "know" functions seems to be either a semantics in which (...) knowledge claims (about the "external world") are trivially logically false or no intelligible semantics at all. (shrink)

Contextualist treatments of clashes of intuitions can allow that two claims, apparently in conflict, can both be true. But making true utterances is far from the only thing that matters — there are often substantive normative questions about what contextual parameters are appropriate to a given conversational situation. This paper foregrounds the importance of the social power to set contextual standards, and how it relates to injustice and oppression, introducing a phenomenon I call "contextual injustice," which has (...) to do with the unjust manipulation of conversational parameters in context-sensitive discourse. My central example applies contextualism about knowledge ascriptions to questions about knowledge regarding sexual assault allegations, but I will also discuss parallel dynamics in other examples of context-sensitive language involving politically significant terms, including gender terms. The central upshot is that the connections between language, epistemology, and social justice are very deeply interlinked. (shrink)

Deliberate contextual vocabulary acquisition (CVA) is a reader’s ability to figure out a (not the) meaning for an unknown word from its “context”, without external sources of help such as dictionaries or people. The appropriate context for such CVA is the “belief-revised integration” of the reader’s prior knowledge with the reader’s “internalization” of the text. We discuss unwarranted assumptions behind some classic objections to CVA, and present and defend a computational theory of CVA that we have adapted to (...) a new classroom curriculum designed to help students use CVA to improve their reading comprehension. (shrink)

Contextual vocabulary acquisition (CVA) is the deliberate acquisition of a meaning for a word in a text by reasoning from context, where “context” includes: (1) the reader’s “internalization” of the surrounding text, i.e., the reader’s “mental model” of the word’s “textual context” (hereafter, “co-text” [3]) integrated with (2) the reader’s prior knowledge (PK), but it excludes (3) external sources such as dictionaries or people. CVA is what you do when you come across an unfamiliar word in your reading, (...) realize that you don’t know what it means, decide that you need to know what it means in order to understand the passage, but there is no one around to ask, and it is not in the dictionary (or you are too lazy to look it up). In such a case, you can try to figure out its meaning “from context”, i.e., from clues in the co-text together with your prior knowledge. Our computational theory of CVA—implemented in a the SNePS knowledge representation and reasoning system [28]—begins with a stored knowledge base containing SNePS representations of relevant PK, inputs SNePS representations of a passage containing an unfamiliar word, and draws inferences from these two (integrated) information sources. When asked to define the word, definition algorithms deductively search the resulting network for information of the sort that might be found in a dictionary definition, outputting a definition frame whose slots are the kinds of features that a definition might contain (e.g., class membership, properties, actions, spatio-temporal information, etc.) and whose slot-fillers contain information gleaned from the network [6–8,20,23,24]. We are investigating ways to make our system more robust, to embed it in a naturallanguage-processing system, and to incorporate morphological information. Our research group, including reading educators, is also applying our methods to the develop-. (shrink)

As European colonies in Asia and Africa became independent nations, as the United States engaged in war in Southeast Asia and in covert operations in South America, anthropologists questioned their interactions with their subjects and worried about the political consequences of government-supported research. By 1970, some spoke of anthropology as “the child of Western imperialism” and as “scientific colonialism.” Ironically, as the link between anthropology and colonialism became more widely accepted within the discipline, serious interest in examining the history of (...) anthropology in colonial contexts diminished. This volume is an effort to initiate a critical historical consideration of the varying “colonial situations” in which (and out of which) ethnographic knowledge essential to anthropology has been produced. The essays comment on ethnographic work from the middle of the nineteenth century to nearly the end of the twentieth, in regions from Oceania through southeast Asia, the Andaman Islands, and southern Africa to North and South America. The “colonial situations” also cover a broad range, from first contact through the establishment of colonial power, from District Officer administrations through white settler regimes, from internal colonialism to international mandates, from early “pacification” to wars of colonial liberation, from the expropriation of land to the defense of ecology. The motivations and responses of the anthropologists discussed are equally varied: the romantic resistance of Maclay and the complicity of Kubary in early colonialism; Malinowski’s salesmanship of academic anthropology; Speck’s advocacy of Indian land rights; Schneider’s grappling with the ambiguities of rapport; and Turner’s facilitation of Kaiapo cinematic activism. “Provides fresh insights for those who care about the history of science in general and that of anthropology in particular, and a valuable reference for professionals and graduate students.”—Choice “Among the most distinguished publications in anthropology, as well as in the history of social sciences.”—George Marcus, Anthropologica. (shrink)

In Science as Social Knowledge in 1990 and The Fate of Knowledge in 2002, Helen Longino develops an epistemological theory known as Critical Contextual Empiricism (CCE). Knowledge production, she argues, is an active, value-laden practice, evidence is context dependent and relies on background assumptions, and science is a social inquiry that, under certain conditions, produces social knowledge with contextual objectivity. While Longino’s work has been generally well-received, there have been a number of criticisms of (...) CCE raised in the philosophical literature in recent years. In this paper I outline the key elements of Longino’s theory and propose modifications to the four norms offered by the account. The version of CCE I defend, which draws on lessons learned by medical researchers in recent years, gives principles of epistemic diversity a central role and also provides greater specification of three of the four norms. Further, it offers additional resources for defending CCE against Alvin Goldman’s suggestion that there is a need for a “healthy dogmatism” in science, as well as a concern about “manufactured uncertainty” arising out of recent work by David Michaels. Finally, the modified version proposed here is also well positioned to respond (negatively) to a suggestion from Kristen Intemann that CCE needs to be adapted to incorporate a central insight from feminist standpoint theory. In light of the variety of social pressures influencing contemporary scientific research, and the role of science in shaping public policy, I argue that a rigorous social epistemology such as CCE is indispensable for understanding and assessing contemporary scientific practice. (shrink)

We discuss a research project that develops and applies algorithms for computational contextual vocabulary acquisition (CVA): learning the meaning of unknown words from context. We try to unify a disparate literature on the topic of CVA from psychology, first- and secondlanguage acquisition, and reading science, in order to help develop these algorithms: We use the knowledge gained from the computational CVA system to build an educational curriculum for enhancing students’ abilities to use CVA strategies in their reading of (...) science texts at the middle-school and college undergraduate levels. The knowledge gained from case studies of students using our CVA techniques feeds back into further development of our computational theory. Keywords: artificial intelligence, knowledge representation, reading, reasoning, science education, vocabulary acquisition. (shrink)

Epistemological contextualism and semantic contextualism are two distinct but closely entangled projects in contemporary philosophy. According to epistemological contextualism, our knowledge attributions are context-sensitive. That is, the truth-conditions of knowledge ascribing sentences – sentences of the form of (1) S knows that p - vary depending on the context in which they are uttered. Contextualism admits the legitimacy of several epistemic standards that vary with the context of use of (1); it might be right to claim – for (...) the same cognitive subject S and the same proposition p – that (1) is true in one context, and false in another. The epistemological contextualist thesis is grounded in a semantic claim about the context-sensitivity of the predicate “know”: the semantic thesisis that a sentence of the form (1) does not express a complete proposition. Different utterances of (1) can, in different contexts, express different propositions: we must add in information about the context in order to determine the proposition expressed by (1). Many scholars have tried to spell out the semantic contextualist thesis on which epistemological contextualism is grounded. Our general aim in this paper is to evaluate the plausibility of a project that takes the opposite starting point, that is establishing the semantic contextualist thesis on the epistemological one. According to semantic contextualism, virtually no sentences of a naturallanguage express complete propositions – meaning underdetermines truth conditions. In our paper, instead of assuming the traditional view of meaning in terms of truth conditions, we suggest that a theory of meaning as justification may shed new light on the contextualist approach. We thus show how the notion of justification can be contextualized, arguing that our attempt provides an interesting and quite straightforward way of contextualizing meaning. (shrink)

This essay critiques the ontology and epistemology of African philosophy, with particular attention to Odera Oruka’s sage philosophy project, one of the most influential schools of thought in African philosophy. Oruka posits an absolutist ontology that holds to a conception of epistemology as presuppositionless and transcendental. Against this, I argue for a critical contextual epistemology that proffers a view of epistemology as embodied, linguistically performed, social, ideological, rhetorical, and contextual. I argue, ultimately, that a critical contextual epistemology (...) is not only useful for charting new directions in African philosophy but also may illuminate productive intersections between African philosophy and Western philosophy. (shrink)

Contextual type theories are largely explored in their applications to programming languages, but less investigated for knowledge representation purposes. The combination of a constructive language with a modal extension of contexts appears crucial to explore the attractive idea of a type-theoretical calculus of provability from refutable assumptions for non-monotonic reasoning. This paper introduces such a language: the modal operators are meant to internalize two different modes of correctness, respectively with necessity as the standard notion of constructive verification and (...) possibility as provability up to refutation of contextual conditions. (shrink)

The findings of our experiments showed that social network sites such as Google Plus, Facebook, and Twitter, have the ability to acquire knowledge about their users’ movements not only within SNSs but also beyond SNS boundaries, particularly among websites that embedded SNS widgets such as Google’s Plus One button, Facebook’s Like button, and Twitter’s Tweet button. In this paper, we analysed the privacy implication of such a practice from a moral perspective by applying Helen Nissenbaum’s decision heuristic derived from (...) her contextual integrity framework in order to answer the question of whether or not an online user’s privacy is being violated by this practice. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend a grammatical account of scalar implicatures. In particular, I submit new evidence in favor of the contextual blindness principle, assumed in recent versions of the grammatical account. I argue that mismatching scalar implicatures can be generated even when the restrictor of the universal quantifier in a universal alternative is contextually known to be empty. The crucial evidence consists of a hitherto unnoticed oddness asymmetry between formally analogous existential sentences with reference failure NPs. I conclude (...) that the generation of mismatching scalar implicatures does not require contextual access. (shrink)

Evolutionary science (ES) and contextual behavioral science (CBS) have developed largely independently during the last half century. However, the earlier histories of these two bodies of knowledge are thoroughly entwined. ES provides a unifying theoretical framework for the biological sciences, and is increasingly being applied to human-related sciences. Meanwhile, CBS is concerned with influencing human behavior in a practical sense. This groundbreaking volume seeks to integrate ES and CBS to promote real, positive change in peoples' lives. Evolution and (...) Contextual Behavioral Science offers a unique glimpse into the histories of ES and CBS, shows how they are intrinsically linked, and outlines why their integration--or, reunification--is essential. By examining these two schools of thought side by side, you'll gain an understanding of why functional and contextual approaches in CBS need to be combined with ES for both fields to advance more rapidly. Finally, rather than the sequential relationship that is typically imagined between ES and CBS, you'll discover how an integrated relationship between these two sciences will result in a better framework for understanding predicting, and influencing human behavior--back cover. (shrink)

The compliance officers' (CO) profession has been evolving over the last few decades. The expectations placed upon the individuals holding such a position vary across jurisdictions, but they are all expected to ensure employees and management of the business entity comply with the law. Given the limited research on CO in Europe, and the increasing public interest in this profession, the current authors have carried out a survey in Cyprus in an effort to map out and contextualize the CO' profession. (...) The findings illustrate CO's academic and professional qualifications, their awareness of their legal liability, the level of knowledge and job performance of their duties as prescribed by law, as well as gaps in the performance of duties as expected by management, boards, and regulators. The policy implications derived from the study suggest coherence and synergies to be found through common exam and postgraduate qualification in the field of financial compliance. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIt is proposed that experts are able to integrate prior contextual knowledge with emergent visual information to make complex predictive judgments about the world around them, often under heightened levels of uncertainty and extreme time constraints. However, limited knowledge exists about the impact of anxiety on the use of such contextual priors when forming our decisions. We provide a novel insight into the combined impact of contextual priors and anxiety on anticipation in soccer. Altogether, 12 (...) expert soccer players were required to predict the actions of an oncoming opponent while viewing life-sized video simulations of 2-versus-2 defensive scenarios. Performance effectiveness and processing efficiency were measured under four conditions: no contextual priors about the action tendencies of the opponent and low anxiety ; no CP and high anxiety ; CP and LA; CP and HA. The provision of contextual priors did not affect processing efficiency, but it improved performance effectiveness... (shrink)

Feminist theories are concerned to analyse how women can transform society so that they are no longer subordinated, by understanding how patriarchal relations control and constrict them. (Abbott and Wallace, 1997: 284) Feminisms start from the position that women are oppressed within a society, which is patriarchal and socially constructed within knowledge which is malestream. This traditionally defines men such that they are rendered subordinate, within a social world constructed by men. Feminisms are engaged with making transparent patriarchal constructs, (...) and illuminating the ‘spaces’ within which women-realities can become more visible. This paper presents research undertaken by two key services working with male sex workers in central London. The insights gained from this research are discussed, as they allow comparison between the traditionally subordinate position of women and the contextual experiences of the ‘hidden’ population of male sex industry workers. It demonstrates, that like women, for male sex workers, hegenomic and heterosexist constructs ensure that they also occupy a subordinated position within society. (shrink)

There is abundant evidence of contextual variation in the use of “S knows p.” Contextualist theories explain this variation in terms of semantic hypotheses that refer to standards of justification determined by “practical” features of either the subject’s context (Hawthorne & Stanley) or the ascriber’s context (Lewis, Cohen, & DeRose). There is extensive linguistic counterevidence to both forms. I maintain that the contextual variation of knowledge claims is better explained by common pragmatic factors. I show here that (...) one is variable strictness. “S knows p” is commonly used loosely to implicate “S is close enough to knowing p for contextually indicated purposes.” A pragmatic account may use a range of semantics, even contextualist. I use an invariant semantics on which knowledge requires complete justification. This combination meets the Moorean constraint as well as any linguistic theory should, and meets the intuition constraint much better than contextualism. There is no need for ad hoc error theories. The variation in conditions of assertability and practical rationality is better explained by variably strict constraints. It will follow that “S knows p” is used loosely to implicate that the condition for asserting “p” and using it in practical reasoning are satisfied. (shrink)

The use of ‘S knows p’ varies from context to context. The contextualist theories of Cohen, Lewis, and DeRose explain this variation in terms of semantic hypotheses: ‘S knows p’ is indexical in meaning, referring to features of the ascriber’s context like salience, interests, and stakes. The linguistic evidence against contextualism is extensive. I maintain that the contextual variation of knowledge claims results from pragmatic factors. One is variable strictness :395–438, 2007). In addition to its strict use, ‘S (...) knows p’ may be used loosely to implicate that S is close enough to knowing p for contextually indicated purposes. Here I explore another variable: belief about what is known. This factor is pragmatic rather than semantic in that it affects the use of ‘S knows p’ without affecting its truth conditions. While variation in strictness accounts for the variation in the bank, parking, and some lottery cases, variation in belief accounts for the variation in other lottery cases and the epistemology cases. Along the way, I sketch an insensitive invariantist semantics that is strict but non-skeptical, and show how it works with these pragmatic factors. (shrink)

My double aim in this paper is to argue for the claims that, when they are formed in certain ways, some judgements expressed by “I am here now” are both (a) apriori (although not solely in virtue of their meaning), and (b) necessary (albeit trivially so). I will submit that such judgements are “analytic” in the same sense that some judgements are “immune to error through misidentification” when this notion is understood in a relativistic way: in both cases, no component (...) of the content determines the referents upon which the truth of the corresponding judgement depends. I will attempt to show that, beyond conventionally-analytic sentences which are supposed to be (known apriori to be) true just in virtue of (knowledge of their) meaning, there are also contextuallyanalytic judgements that are (known apriori to be) true in virtue of (apriori knowledge of the) reflexive relation between the context of the judgement and the circumstance of evaluation which it targets. (shrink)

The present study aims to identify contextual and psychological factors of proneness to radicalization and violent extremism operationalized through the Militant Extremist Mindset scale consisting of three distinct aspects: Proviolence, Vile World beliefs, and trust in Divine Power. A community sample of 271 high school students from Belgrade and Sandžak regions in Serbia completed: a 24-item MEM scale; contextual measures including a 6-item scale of family dysfunction and a 4-item composite measure capturing exposure to a harsh school environment (...) and peer abuse ; psychological measures including the 9-item Right-Wing Authoritarianism scale, the 5-item Social Dominance Orientation scale, and the 20-item UCLA Loneliness scale. A path analysis was conducted with contextual factors on the first and psychological factors on the second level of the model predicting the three factors of MEM. LON was positively predicted by FDys and HSE, SDO by HSE only, while RWA was positively predicted by FDys only. Contextual and psychological factors accounted for 27% of the variance in PV, 15% of the variance in VW, and 31% of the variance in DP. Obtained findings reveal a complex interplay of contextual and psychological drivers in the prediction of different aspects of RVE and build upon existing knowledge on risk factors associated with RVE. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Interpreting ContextualitiesStephen DaviesIf, as so often demanded, the context of a literary work should be considered in interpreting it, which context is that? Is it the past context within which the work was created, or, rather, the different context in which the book and interpreter presently are located? In this essay, I consider theories of interpretation that disagree on the answers to these questions. To appropriate terms that have (...) become fashionable, one presents a model for interpretation that is “readerly” in being restrained and backward-looking, while the second allows for interpretations that are “writerly” in being creative and forward-looking. Both kinds of interpretation are used in literary criticism, with the first paying homage to the efforts of the work’s creator and the second showing respect for meanings the work presents to the critic’s contemporary audience. I argue that, despite appearances to the contrary, the first theory is no less capable than the second of accounting for actual critical practice. If not by seeing which account better matches the practice, how might we adjudicate between them? This is to be done by considering whether the creation and appreciation of literature answers primarily to an interest in works alone, or to works as the product of human authors. I prefer the second alternative and suggest that an interest in works as of their authors can be consistent with the widely held view that literary works admit of multiple interpretations.II call the first account of interpretation the Original Context Theory. It holds that the meaning of a literary work is fixed by factors holding at the time of the work’s creation. (A work might be revolutionary in style, [End Page 20] of course, but in that case it will be apparent that standard literary practices are invoked only to be challenged or repudiated.) The original context theory comes in at least three versions, depending on which of the factors present at the work’s creation is given primacy.Actual intentionalism maintains that the author’s successfully realized intentions determine the work’s meaning. 1 This variant of the original context theory holds that a literary work has the meaning that its author intends, provided that the author carries through the relevant intentions in appropriately employing the language of the day, as well as the then recognized conventions of the given genre and artistic practice. The artist’s intentions, if successfully executed, are publicly manifest in the work but will be recognized only by those familiar with the linguistic and artistic practices by which their expression is facilitated. The meaning of a work can be ambiguous or multi-layered, but usually this is because it is created to be so. The intentions need not be present to the author’s mind; they need not be self-consciously formulated as he works. Moreover, the author might have difficulty in articulating or formulating his intentions if asked, just as one often has difficulty in describing what one does in performing a familiar yet complex action. But they are nonetheless his intentions, nor are they the more difficult to discern in the product of those actions, for these facts.Hypothetical intentionalism holds that the work’s meaning is determined by inferences made by a suitably placed audience to the intentions of a hypothetical author, where these inferences are founded on a grasp of the linguistic conventions and artistic practices of the day, as well as publicly available knowledge concerning the creation of the given work. 2 Here the meaning of the work is generated by hypothesizing intentions authors might have had, given the context of creation, rather than relying on their actual intentions. Such inferences must have interpersonal validity if they are to reveal a meaning that can be attributed legitimately to the work. Because more than one set of inferences can be justifiable, a work might possess or display a multiplicity of meanings, even if the actual author intended only one of these.Conventionalism maintains that the conventions of language and art in place when the work was created are sufficient to secure the work’s meaning. 3 This last variant focuses on “utterance” rather than “utterer... (shrink)

Contextualism has become one of the leading paradigms in contemporary epistemology. According to this view, there is no context-independent standard of knowledge, and as a result, all knowledge ascriptions are context-sensitive. Contextualists contend that their account of this analysis allows us to resolve some major epistemological problems such as skeptical paradoxes and the lottery paradox, and that it helps us explain various other linguistic data about knowledge ascriptions. The apparent ease with which contextualism seems to solve numerous (...) epistemological quandaries has inspired the burgeoning interest in it. This comprehensive anthology collects twenty original essays and critical commentaries on different aspects of contextualism, written by leading philosophers on the topic. The editors’ introduction sketches the historical development of the contextualist movement and provides a survey and analysis of its arguments and major positions. (shrink)

The findings of our experiments showed that social network sites such as Google Plus, Facebook, and Twitter, have the ability to acquire knowledge about their users’ movements not only within SNSs but also beyond SNS boundaries, particularly among websites that embedded SNS widgets such as Google’s Plus One button, Facebook’s Like button, and Twitter’s Tweet button. In this paper, we analysed the privacy implication of such a practice from a moral perspective by applying Helen Nissenbaum’s decision heuristic derived from (...) her contextual integrity framework in order to answer the question of whether or not an online user’s privacy is being violated by this practice. (shrink)

In Pantsar, an outline for an empirically feasible epistemological theory of arithmetic is presented. According to that theory, arithmetical knowledge is based on biological primitives but in the resulting empirical context develops an essentially a priori character. Such contextual a priori theory of arithmetical knowledge can explain two of the three characteristics that are usually associated with mathematical knowledge: that it appears to be a priori and objective. In this paper it is argued that it can (...) also explain the third one: why arithmetical knowledge appears to be necessary. A Kripkean analysis of necessity is used as an example to show that a proper analysis of the relevant possible worlds can explain arithmetical necessity in a sufficiently strong form. (shrink)