contextualist

Contextualist is a term used to describe adherents of contextualism, a family of positions in philosophy and linguistics that hold that context influences how we interpret statements, determine their truth-conditions, or assess their epistemic status. The central claim is that the same sentence can express different propositions in different contexts, or that judgments about knowledge or truth depend on contextual factors such as the speaker, the audience, or the purpose of the inquiry.

In epistemology, epistemic contextualism maintains that whether a person knows something can vary with context due to shifting standards of justification or evidence. For example, everyday claims like “I know I have hands” may be true in ordinary contexts but not in highly skeptical contexts with stricter criteria. Keith DeRose is a prominent advocate of this view, and it has generated extensive debate with invariantist accounts that suppose knowledge is context-independent.

In semantics and philosophy of language, contextualism asserts that the content of certain expressions—especially indexicals such as I, here, and now, and demonstratives—depends on the context of utterance. This means the precise content an utterance expresses can change with who is speaking, where, and when. Contextualist semantics aims to explain how people can communicate effectively across different situations by allowing meaning to shift with context.

Contextualist theories have influenced discussions in pragmatics and cognitive science, and they continue to be debated regarding explanatory power, empirical testability, and how best to distinguish contextual content from stable, context-insensitive meaning.