Episode 12: Jason Bridges discusses contextualism
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What is contextualism and why does it matter for philosophy?
Hello and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast recorded at the University of Chicago. I'm Matt Tykeman. And I'm Mark Hoppwood. With us today is Jason Bridges, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago, and he's here to talk to us about contextualism. Jason Bridges, welcome. Thank you. So I guess the obvious question to begin with is what is contextualism?
Well, in contemporary discussions, contextualism is used as a label for like a really sprawling family of views and it's hard to find a common thread like among all of them. But I suppose what you might call mainstream contextualist views have a couple of things in common. And the ground floor thing they have in common is that they are all claims about when the things people say are true and when they're false. In other words, there are claims about the truth conditions of utterances. A truth condition being a condition under which something is true, and so correlatively false. And an utterance being typically an utterance of a sentence, like a sentence of English. There's a side issue here which we might do well just to set aside at least for the moment, though maybe we can come back to it.
And that issue is what exactly is thought to possess the truth conditions that contextualists talk about. About, there's various possibilities. So you might think that an uttered sentence itself can be true or false and so can have a truth condition. You might think that the saying of the sentence can be true or false and so have a truth condition. You might think that what is claimed or asserted in the saying of a sentence might itself have a truth condition. You might think these things are actually distinct and possibly can come apart. And so there's room for contextualists to disagree about To make different claims about which sort of truth condition they're talking about. But as I say, let's set that aside for now.
Just talk about the truth conditions of utterances. And so if we do that, then what all these mainstream contextualist views have in common is they claim that truth conditions of utterances depend upon the context of the utterance. Not just on the uttered sentence, but on features of parameters involved in a given utterance of that sentence. Now that is at least sometimes the case with at least some utterances and some sentences has long been acknowledged by people. So take the sentence, I am cold. So suppose I say now, I am cold. What's the truth condition of my utterance of that sentence? Well as I would put it, it's that I am cold, right? What I say is true if and only if I am cold. Now you, Mark, you say I am cold.
You uh utter the same sentence. What's the truth condition of your utterance of that sentence? Well it's true or false if and only if you, Mark are cold, not me, Jason. Or similarly, if three hours from now I were to say, I am cold, then the truth condition of that utterance would be whether or not I'm cold at that moment three hours from now. So we have three different truth conditions, but the same sentence in each case. So clearly the truth conditions of the utterance depends not just on the uttered sentence and properties that that uttered sentence has in and of itself, but on features of the context of utterance. In particular, clearly in this case the speaker and And the time of utterance. So, as I say, that that sort of phenomenon obtains has long been acknowledged by anyone who thinks about language at all.
Contextualists tend to claim that there's more context dependence, and context dependence in places where people haven't traditionally recognized there to be. And so a contextualist might claim that utterances of sentences involving the word no, that is K-N-O-W. or good or green have truth conditions that depend upon features of the context of utterance. So not just words like I or you or here or now, but other words. Radical contextualists will claim that in fact, whatever the sentence is, whatever the words are, you're gonna have context dependence.
So I guess in a in a very minimal sense we're all contextualists if we recognise the kind of linguistic phenomena that you were talking about earlier, so the case of cold.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is contextualism and why does it matter for philosophy?
0:19–4:48
2
How do truth‑conditions of an utterance depend on the speaker, time, and context?
4:48–9:10
3
What examples illustrate radical contextualism (e.g., the “rich” case and the bank‑open case)?
9:10–13:54
4
How does epistemological contextualism use practical interests and doubts to shift knowledge standards?
13:54–19:05
5
What role do skeptical doubts play in changing truth‑conditions according to contextualists?
19:05–25:10
6
Why do contextualists struggle with disagreement and the “conversation‑level” of truth?
25:10–29:00
7
How might methodological contextualism (e.g., Wittgenstein) differ from the mainstream view?
29:00–33:41
8
What are the main criticisms of contextualism and its ability to address skepticism?
33:41–39:47
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