This article is a survey of the literature on context sensitivity in the philosophy of language.

In this paper, I argue that Contextualist theories of semantics are not undermined by their purported failure to explain the practice of indirect reporting. I adopt Cappelen & Lepore’s test for context sensitivity to show that the scope of context sensitivity is much broader than Semantic Minimalists are willing to accept. The failure of their arguments turns on their insistence that the content of indirect reports is semantically minimal.

In medical ethics, business ethics, and some branches of political philosophy (multi-culturalism, issues of just allocation, and equitable distribution) the literature increasingly combines insights from ethics and the social sciences. Some authors in medical ethics even speak of a new phase in the history of ethics, hailing "empirical ethics" as a logical next step in the development of practical ethics after the turn to "applied ethics." The name empirical ethics is ill-chosen because of its associations with "descriptive ethics." Unlike descriptive (...) ethics, however, empirical ethics aims to be both descriptive and normative. The first question on which I focus is what kind of empirical research is used by empirical ethics and for which purposes. I argue that the ultimate aim of all empirical ethics is to improve the context-sensitivity of ethics. The second question is whether empirical ethics is essentially connected with specific positions in meta-ethics. I show that in some kinds of meta-ethical theories, which I categorize as broad contextualist theories, there is an intrinsic need for connecting normative ethics with empirical social research. But context-sensitivity is a goal that can be aimed for from any meta-ethical position. (shrink)

This thesis has two parts. In Part I there is an argument for the conclusion that a linguistic phenomenon known as (radical) context-sensitivity is to be expected given the limitations of those who use language to reason about empirical states of affairs. The phenomenon arises as a consequence of a process that must be performed to use language to reason validly. In Part II it is explained why the phenomenon, understood in light of the discussion of Part I, (...) does not threaten the possibility of communication. Some potential readers might be interested to know that in Part I there's a fair amount of exegesis of arguments for the existence of (radical) context-sensitivity put forward by Charles Travis. Some potential readers might be interested to know that in Part II use is made of work by Erving Goffman and some conversation analysts. (shrink)

Epistemologists typically assume that the acquisition of knowledge from testimony is not threatened at the stage at which audiences interpret what proposition a speaker has asserted. Attention is instead typically paid to the epistemic status of a belief formed on the basis of testimony that it is assumed has the same content as the speaker’s assertion. Andrew Peet has pioneered an account of how linguistic context sensitivity can threaten the assumption. His account locates the threat in contexts in (...) which an audience’s evidence under-determines which proposition a speaker is asserting. I argue that Peet’s epistemic uncertainty account of the threat is mistaken and I propose an alternative. The alternative locates the threat in contexts that provide factors that give audiences a mistaken psychological certainty or confidence that a speaker has asserted a proposition she has not. (shrink)

I argue that practically all vague language is context sensitive in a covert and unfamiliar way. I first outline a novel puzzle concerning the interaction of conditionals and vagueness. I then argue that the best way of resolving the puzzle is by positing context‐sensitive penumbral connections between sundry parts of language. I argue that these penumbral connections shift through a distinct form of Lewisian accommodation. The upshot is that meaning is a far shiftier thing than has typically been (...) thought. (shrink)

Despite the recent upsurge in research on abstract concepts, there remain puzzles at the foundation of their empirical study. These are most evident when we consider what is required to assess a person’s abstract conceptual abilities without using language as a prompt or requiring it as a response—as in classic non-verbal categorization tasks, which are standardly considered tests of conceptual understanding. After distinguishing two divergent strands in the most common conception of what it is for a concept to be abstract, (...) we argue that neither reliably captures the kind of abstraction required to successfully categorize in non-verbal tasks. We then present a new conception of concept abstractness—termed Trial Concreteness—that is keyed to individual categorization trials. It has advantages in capturing the context-relativity of the degree of abstraction required for the application of a concept and fittingly correlates with participant success in recent experiments. (shrink)

Empirical investigation of the conditions under which people prefer, or disprefer, causal explanation, has suggested to many that our judgements about what causally explains what are context sensitive in a number of ways. This has led many to suppose that whether or not a causal explanation obtains depends on various contextual factors, and that said explanations can obtain in one context, and not in another: they are both subjective and agent-relative. Surprisingly, most accounts of metaphysical explanation suppose there (...) to be no psychological, epistemic, or more broadly contextual, aspect to metaphysical explanation. Recently this approach has come under fire from those who argue that since metaphysical explanations are explanations, we should expect them to be both subjective and agent-relative. To date, however, there is no evidence about the conditions under which we make judgements about what metaphysically explains what. In what follows we remedy this. We find that judgements about what metaphysically explains what are indeed context sensitive. We then reflect on the implications of this discovery for extant accounts of metaphysical explanation. (shrink)

This paper explores three important interrelated themes in Putnam’s philosophy: language, meaning, and the context-sensitivity of “truth-evaluable content.” It shows how Putnam’s own version of semantic externalism is able to steer a middle course between an internalism about meaning that requires a “language of thought” (or “mentalese”) and a mind-independent realism about meaning that requires Platonic objects (or other such “abstract entities”), while doing justice to how ascriptions of meaning are causally related to the objective world. The following (...) account is able to allow for the primacy of language over thought while ensuring that the content of thought is partially fixed by the external world. The emphasis in Putnam’s later writings on the “context sensitivity” of meaning are often construed as marking a major departure from his earlier thought. It is here argued that such an interpretation involves a misunderstanding both of the commitments of Putnam’s original form of semantic externalism and of the implications of the version of context sensitivity he embraces. (shrink)

We argue that prediction success maximization is a basic objective of cognition and cortex, that it is compatible with but distinct from prediction error minimization, that neither objective requires subtractive coding, that there is clear neurobiological evidence for the amplification of predicted signals, and that we are unconvinced by evidence proposed in support of subtractive coding. We outline recent discoveries showing that pyramidal cells on which our cognitive capabilities depend usually transmit information about input to their basal dendrites and amplify (...) that transmission when input to their distal apical dendrites provides a context that agrees with the feedforward basal input in that both are depolarizing, i.e., both are excitatory rather than inhibitory. Though these intracellular discoveries require a level of technical expertise that is beyond the current abilities of most neuroscience labs, they are not controversial and acclaimed as groundbreaking. We note that this cellular cooperative context-sensitivity greatly enhances the cognitive capabilities of the mammalian neocortex, and that much remains to be discovered concerning its evolution, development, and pathology. (shrink)

One aim of this essay is to contribute to understanding aesthetic communication—the process by which agents aim to convey thoughts and transmit knowledge about aesthetic matters to others. Our focus will be on the use of aesthetic adjectives in aesthetic communication. Although theorists working on the semantics of adjectives have developed sophisticated theories about gradable adjectives, they have tended to avoid studying aesthetic adjectives—the class of adjectives that play a central role in expressing aesthetic evaluations. And despite the wealth of (...) attention paid to aesthetic adjectives by philosophical aestheticians, they have paid little attention to contemporary linguistic theories of adjectives. We take our work to be a first step in remedying these lacunae. In this paper, we present four experiments that examine one aspect of how aesthetic adjectives ordinarily function: the context-sensitivity of their application standards. Our results present a prima facie empirical challenge to a common distinction between relative and absolute gradable adjectives because aesthetic adjectives are found to behave differently from both. Our results thus also constitute a prima facie vindication of some philosophical aestheticians’ contention that aesthetic adjectives constitute a particularly interesting segment of natural language, even if the boundaries of this segment might turn out to be different from what they had in mind. (shrink)

What is the relationship between the claim that generics articulate psychologically primitive generalizations and the claim that they exhibit a unique form of context sensitivity? This article maintains that the two claims are compatible. It develops and defends an overlooked form of contextualism grounded in the idiosyncrasies of system 1 thought.

Arguments for context-sensitivity are often based on judgments about the truth values of sentences: a sentence seems true in one context and false in another, so it is argued that the truth conditions of the sentence shift between these contexts. Such arguments rely on the assumption that our judgments reflect the actual truth values of sentences in context. Here, I present a non-semantic explanation of these judgments. In short, our judgments about the truth values of sentences (...) are driven by heuristics that are only fallible reflections of actual truth values. These heuristics can lead to different truth-value judgments in different contexts, even when the sentence at issue is not semantically context-sensitive. As a case study, I consider Sterken’s (Philos. Imprint, 15, 2015a) argument for the context-sensitivity of generic generalisations. I provide a non-semantic explanation of Sterken’s truth-value judgments, which builds on Leslie’s (Philos Perspect 21(1):375–403, 2007; Philos Rev 117(1):1–47, 2008) theory of default generalisation. (shrink)

Is understanding subject to a factivity constraint? That is, must the agent’s representation of some subject matter be accurate in order for her to understand that subject matter? ‘No’, I argue in this paper. As an alternative, I formulate a novel manipulationist account of understanding. Rather than correctly representing, understanding, on this account, is a matter of being able to manipulate a representation of the world to satisfy contextually salient interests. This account of understanding is preferable to factivism, I argue, (...) mainly for simplicity reasons. While it explains the intuitive data about understanding as successfully as factivist accounts, it is simpler by virtue of reducing the value truth bestows on understanding to that of usability. (shrink)

This paper is a partial review of the literature on ‘social preferences'. There are empirical findings that convincingly demonstrate the existence of social preferences, but there are also studies that indicate their fragility. So how robust are social preferences, and how exactly are they context dependent? One of the most promising insights from the literature, in my view, is an equilibrium explanation of mutually referring conditional social preferences and expectations. I use this concept of equilibrium, summarized by means of (...) a figure, to discuss a range of empirical studies. Where appropriate, I also briefly discuss a couple of insights from the (mostly parallel) evolutionary literature about cooperation. A concrete case of the Orma in Kenya will be used as a motivating example in the beginning. (shrink)

The emphasis on evidence based medicine (EBM) has placed increased focus on finding timely answers to clinical questions in presence of patients. Using a combination of natural language processing for the generation of clinical excerpts and information theoretic distance based clustering, we evaluated multiple approaches for the efficient presentation of context-sensitive EBM excerpts.

Studies of several languages, including Swahili [swa], suggest that realis (actual, realizable) and irrealis (unlikely, counterfactual) meanings vary along a scale (e.g., 0.0–1.0). T-values (True, False) and P-values (probability) account for this pattern. However, logic cannot describe or explain (a) epistemic stances toward beliefs, (b) deontic and dynamic stances toward states-of-being and actions, and (c) context-sensitivity in conditional interpretations. (a)–(b) are deictic properties (positions, distance) of ‘embodied’ Frames of Reference (FoRs)—space-time loci in which agents perceive and from which (...) they contextually act (Rohrer 2007a, b). I argue that the embodied FoR describes and explains (a)–(c) better than T-values and P-values alone. In this cognitive-functional-descriptive study, I represent these embodied FoRs using Unified Modeling Language (UML) mental spaces in analyzing Swahili conditional constructions to show how necessary, sufficient, and contributing conditions obtain on the embodied FoR networks level. (shrink)

Purpose – The paper aims to investigate how blockchain technology can be strategically applied to enhance accountability, transparency, and operational integrity in governance and public health systems within a developing country context. The participants of the study were key stakeholders from government, healthcare, civil society, academia, and the technology sector in the Philippines. -/- Design/methodology/approach – A qualitative exploratory research design was employed using semi-structured interviews with twelve purposively selected informants. Data were analyzed thematically following Braun and Clarke’s six-phase (...) framework. The analysis was guided by blockchain governance theory, responsible innovation, and digital trust frameworks. -/- Findings – The results revealed four core themes: governance transparency, health data integrity, adoption challenges, and ethical and social considerations. These themes informed the development of a four-pillar Strategic Framework for Accountability, which integrates governance transparency mechanisms, health data resilience, institutional readiness, and ethical inclusion. The findings further indicated that blockchain’s transformative potential extends beyond its technical design, offering mechanisms to restore institutional trust, safeguard health data, and strengthen credibility in procurement, land registration, and health systems. -/- Research limitations/implications – As the present study only examined blockchain adoption in the Philippine setting, future research may expand the framework through cross-national comparisons, larger sample sizes, and mixedmethod evaluations to assess blockchain’s long-term impacts on institutional performance, equity, and trust. -/- Practical implications – The findings of the study provide policymakers and institutions with a context-sensitive roadmap for blockchain adoption. The framework emphasizes regulatory foresight, stakeholder education, citizen participation, and organizational capacity as prerequisites for sustainable implementation. These insights can guide governments and health agencies in integrating blockchain ethically and effectively -/- Social implications – The study highlights blockchain’s potential to promote inclusive and transparent public services by addressing corruption, data fragmentation, and inequitable access. By embedding ethical safeguards and participatory mechanisms, blockchain adoption can strengthen citizen trust and contribute to resilient governance in developing nations. -/- Originality/value – The study offers one of the first empirically grounded frameworks that unites blockchain applications in governance and public health within a developing country context. By synthesizing theoretical perspectives with field insights, it advances blockchain scholarship while providing a scalable and ethically grounded model for transparent and accountable public service delivery in Southeast Asia and beyond. (shrink)

Some contextually sensitive expressions are such that their context independent conventional meanings need to be in some way supplemented in context for the expressions to secure semantic values in those contexts. As we’ll see, it is not clear that there is a paradigm here, but ‘he’ used demonstratively is a clear example of such an expression. Call expressions of this sort supplementives in order to highlight the fact that their context independent meanings need to be supplemented in (...) context for them to have semantic values relative to the context. Many philosophers and linguists think that there is a lot of contextual sensitivity in natural language that goes well beyond the pure indexicals and supplementives like ‘he’. Constructions/expressions that are good candidates for being contextually sensitive include: quantifiers, gradable adjectives including “predicates of personal taste”, modals, conditionals, possessives and relational expressions taking implicit arguments. It would appear that in none of these cases does the expression/construction in question have a context independent meaning that when placed in context suffices to secure a semantic value for the expression/construction in the context. In each case, some sort of supplementation is required to do this. Hence, all these expressions are supplementives in my sense. For a given supplementive, the question arises as to what the mechanism is for supplementing its conventional meanings in context so as to secure a semantic value for it in context. That is, what form does the supplementation take? The question also arises as to whether different supplementives require different kinds of supplementation. Let us call an account of what, in addition to its conventional meaning, secures a semantic value for a supplementive in context a metasemantics for that supplementive. So we can put our two questions thus: what is the proper metasemantics for a given supplementive; and do all supplementives have the same metasemantics? In the present work, I sketch the metasemantics I formulated for demonstratives in earlier work. Next, I briefly consider a number of other supplementives that I think the metasemantics I propose plausibly applies to and explain why I think that. Finally, I consider the prospects for extending the account to all supplementives. In so doing, I take up arguments due to Michael Glanzberg to the effect that supplementives are governed by two different metasemantics and attempt to respond to them. (shrink)

The possibility of knowledge attributions across contexts (where attributor and subject find themselves in different epistemic contexts) can create serious problems for certain views of knowledge. Amongst such views is subject—sensitive invariantism—the view that knowledge is determined not only by epistemic factors (belief, truth, evidence, etc.) but also by non—epistemic factors (practical interests, etc.). I argue that subject—sensitive invariantism either runs into a contradiction or has to make very implausible assumptions. The problem has been very much neglected but is so (...) serious that one should look for alternative accounts of knowledge. (shrink)

Plausibly, how much is at stake in some salient practical task can affect how generously people ascribe knowledge of task-relevant facts. There is a metaphysical puzzle about this phenomenon, and an empirical puzzle. Metaphysically: there are competing theories about when and how practical stakes affect whether it is correct to ascribe knowledge. Which of these theories is the right one? Empirically: experimental philosophy has struggled to find a stakes-effect on people’s knowledge ascriptions. Is the alleged phenomenon just a philosopher’s fantasy? (...) I propose a new psychological account of when and why people’s knowledge ascriptions are sensitive to stakes. My hypothesis is motivated by empirical research on how people’s judgements are sensitive to their social context. Specifically, people’s evaluations are sensitive to their ‘psychological distance’ from the scenarios they are considering. When using ‘fixed-evidence probes’, experimental philosophy has found that what’s at stake for a fictional character in a made-up scenario has little or no effect on how participants ascribe knowledge to them. My hypothesis predicts this finding: the scenarios are too ‘psychologically distant’ to participants. Our empirical puzzle is resolved: the stakes-effect often present in the wild won’t be present in vignette studies. (This illustrates a widespread problem with X-phi vignette studies: if people might judge differently in other social contexts, we can’t generalize from the results of these experiments. That is, vignette studies are of doubtful ‘external validity’.) The hypothesis also resolves our metaphysical puzzle. It predicts that people do not ascribe knowledge in a way deemed correct by any of the standard philosophical views, namely classical invariantism, interest-relative invariantism, and contextualism. Our knowledge ascriptions shift around in the way that’s most useful for social beings like us, and this pattern in our judgements can only be endorsed by a genuinely relativist metaphysics for knowledge. (shrink)

The main goal of the article is a further development of the usage of income and comparable approaches to company valuation aimed at defining market capitalization sensitivity to value changing in the conditions of dynamization of internal and external business parameters. The relevance of the researched topic is determined by the importance of establishing the factors influencing the change in company market capitalization based on the synthesis of approaches to company valuation. To obtain the results of the study, the (...) following methods were used: structural and logical analysis – to improve the process approach to company valuation in the context of determining the impact of its change on market capitalization; discounted cash flow method (DCF-model) – to determine the value of the enterprise based on the income approach; comparable companies method – to determine the value of the company on the basis of a market approach; factor analysis method – to assess the impact of changes in value on company market capitalization; generalization and logical analysis – in conclusions building. The results of critical analysis of publications of domestic and foreign scientists on the application of company valuation methods identified the need of improvement the process approach to company valuation in the context of determining the impact of its change on the company market capitalization. To adequately assess company value, the use of a synthesis of income and market approaches is proposed. The implementation of the DCF-model and comparable companies valuation method while valuation of Private Joint-Stock Company “SKF Ukraine” allowed to establish that the greatest impact on the target metric (company market capitalization) has an average industry multiplier EV/EBITDA, terminal growth rate and weighted average cost of capital – 5.9 %, 3.2% and 2.7% respectively. The practical value of the results of the study is determined by the importance of forming a full analytical basis for establishing the attractiveness of the performance of joint-stock companies in the market and consolidating management decisionsin order to increase market capitalization. (shrink)

Context-sensitive expressions appear ill suited to the purpose of sharing content across contexts. Yet we regularly use them to that end (in regulations, textbooks, memos, guidelines, laws, minutes, etc.). This paper describes the utility of the concept of a metacontext for understanding cross-contextual content-sharing with context-sensitive expressions. A metacontext is the context of a group of contexts: an infrastructure that can channel non-linguistic incentives on content ascription so as to homogenize the content ascribed to context-sensitive expressions (...) in each context in the group. Documents composed of context-sensitive expressions can share content across contexts when supported by an appropriate metacontext. The bible has its church, the textbook its education system, the form its bureaucracy, and the manifesto its social movement. Some metacontexts support cross-contextual content-sharing. Some don’t. A promising research programme (one with practical importance) would take metacontexts as its unit of analysis. (shrink)

Contextualists and relativists about predicates of personal taste, epistemic modals, and so on (“CR-expressions”) agree that the interpretation of these expressions depends, in some sense, on context. Relativists claim that the sort of context-sensitivity exhibited by CR-expressions is importantly different from that exhibited by paradigm context-sensitive expressions. This bifurcation is often motivated by the claim that the two classes of expressions behave differently in patterns of agreement and disagreement. I provide cases illustrating that the same sorts (...) of discourse phenomena that have been thought problematic for contextualists can arise with paradigm context-sensitive expressions. These cases motivate a more unified treatment of paradigm context-sensitive expressions and the expressions that have figured in recent contextualism/relativism debates. (shrink)

Epistemologists have proposed various norms of assertion to explain when a speaker is in an epistemic position to assert a proposition. In this article I propose a distinct necessary condition on assertibility: that a speaker should assert only what she sensitively believes, where a subject's belief is sensitive just in case the subject would not hold it if it were false. I argue that the Sensitivity Rule underwrites simple explanations for three key features of assertibility that pose explanatory challenges (...) to other prominent proposals: the fact that assertibility is open under known entailment, the general impropriety of assertions that a lottery ticket has lost made purely on the basis of the speaker's knowledge of the odds, and the fact that assertibility varies widely with features of the conversational context. I close by considering three distinct roles the Sensitivity Rule might play in the overall theory of assertibility. (shrink)

According to an influential contextualist solution to skepticism advanced by Keith DeRose, denials of skeptical hypotheses are, in most contexts, strong yet insensitive. The strength of such denials allows for knowledge of them, thus undermining skepticism, while the insensitivity of such denials explains our intuition that we do not know them. In this paper we argue that, under some well-motivated conditions, a negated skeptical hypothesis is strong only if it is sensitive. We also consider how a natural response on behalf (...) of DeRose appears to be equally available to his primary rival (viz., the sensitivity theorist). (shrink)

I wish first to motivate very briefly two points about the kind of context sensitive semantics needed for attitude reports, namely that reports are about referents and about mental representations; then I will compare two proposals for treating the attitudes, both of which capture the two points in question.

This chapter focuses on technological innovation and how insights from technological design can be used to address the challenges associated with the setting in which frugal innovation operates. The resource-constrained setting of frugal innovation puts high demands the design requirements of frugal innovation technologies and the possible conflicts between these requirements. Within the ethics of technology, there is a growing literature that explicitly focuses on how to make technological design more sensitive to important moral values, commonly referred to as value-sensitive (...) design or design for values. However, despite strong commonalities, frugal innovation does not feature as a strong application domain in the literature on value-sensitive design practices. Since frugal innovation takes place in and/or for a resource-constrained context, focusing on just one value could easily lead to other relevant values not being appropriately embedded in the design. For value-sensitive design practices to contribute to frugal innovation, it seems better to think in terms of ‘design for context X’ rather than ‘design for value X’, as the latter may be too narrowly focused on one specific value. Systematic research on design practices is necessary to gain more insight in which values are particularly relevant, both in terms of internal values and in terms of external values, but also in the relevant operationalisations, which may differ substantially in different contexts and which may make value conflicts both more complicated but also more easily solvable. (shrink)

The ethics of technology has primarily focused on what values are and how they can be embedded in technologies through design. In this context, some work has been done to show the efficacy of several design approaches. However, existing studies have not clearly pointed out the ways which design team managers can use design-for-values approaches to organise and use technologies in practice properly. This chapter attempts to fill this gap by discussing the value sensitive design (VSD) approach as a (...) valuable means of co-designing technologies as a toolkit for existing workflow management, in this case, Agile. It will be demonstrated that VSD shows promise as a way of democratically designing technologies as well as fostering democratic technology policy innovation. (shrink)

This paper examines distinctive discourse properties of preposed negative 'yes/no' questions (NPQs), such as 'Isn’t Jane coming too?'. Unlike with other 'yes/no' questions, using an NPQ '∼p?' invariably conveys a bias toward a particular answer, where the polarity of the bias is opposite of the polarity of the question: using the negative question '∼p?' invariably expresses that the speaker previously expected the positive answer p to be correct. A prominent approach—what I call the context-management approach, developed most extensively by (...) Romero and Han (2004)—attempts to capture speaker expectation biases by treating NPQs fundamentally as epistemic questions about the proper discourse status of a proposition. I raise challenges for existing context-managing accounts to provide more adequate formalizations of the posited context-managing content, its implementation in the compositional semantics and discourse dynamics, and its role in generating the observed biases. New data regarding discourse differences between NPQs and associated epistemic modal questions are introduced. I argue that we can capture the roles of NPQs in expressing speakers’ states of mind and managing the discourse common ground without positing special context-managing operators or treating NPQs as questions directly about the context. I suggest that we treat the operator introduced with preposed negation as having an ordinary semantics of epistemic necessity, though lexically associated with a general kind of endorsing use observed with modal expressions. The expressive and context-managing roles of NPQs are explained in terms of a general kind of discourse-oriented use of context-sensitive language. The distinctive expectation biases and discourse properties observed with NPQs are derived from the proposed semantics and a general principle of Discourse Relevance. (shrink)

An important aspect of moral expertise is moral sensitivity, which is the ability to be sensitive to the presence of morally salient features in a context. This requires being able to see and acquire the morally relevant information, as well as organise and interpret it, so that you can undertake the related work of moral judgement, focus (or motivation) and action. As a distinct but interrelated component of ethical expertise, moral sensitivity can and must be trained and (...) educated. However, despite its importance to moral education, there has been comparatively little discussion about the role of ethical sensitivity and the ways that it can be trained within the context of Kant’s, and Kantian, ethics. This paper seeks to address this gap. While Kant does not explicitly focus in detail on moral sensitivity, by breaking sensitivity down into seven distinct aspects through drawing on the Four Component Model, we are able to identify a wealth of resources in Kant’s work from which we can con- struct an account of moral sensitivity education that draws on his underlying moral theory. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article offers a novel sceptical argument that the sensitivity-contextualist must say is sound; moreover, she must say that the conclusion of this argument is true at ordinary standards. The view under scrutiny has it that in different contexts knowledge-attributing sentences express different propositions, propositions which differ in the stretch of worlds across which the subject is required to track the truth. I identify the underlying reason for the sceptical result and argue that it makes sensitivity-contextualism irremediably flawed. (...) Contextualists, I conclude, should abandon sensitivity for some other piece of epistemic machinery. (shrink)

Moral (or ethical) sensitivity is widely viewed as a foundational learning goal in engineering ethics education. We have argued in this paper is that this view of moral sensitivity cannot be readily transported from the nursing context to the engineering context on the basis of a care-analogy. The particularized care characteristic of the nursing context is decisively different from the generalized and universalized forms of care characteristic of the engineering context. Through a focus on (...) care and maintenance, the engineering student’s moral sensitivity can be refined, opening up a perceptual awakening and affectivity towards the complex nature of the engineer’s Other. This awakening is in part promoted through an understanding of the ideology of neutrality as a moment in the history engineering. Becoming aware of this ideology as an ideology can then be seen as an activity of dividing loyalties that allows for a reflexive and critical view of the biases and presuppositions inherited within the world of engineering. This process of deepening the engineering student’s moral sensitivity is perhaps as much a process of the student becoming aware of her professional world, how it shapes her understanding of herself, and what it means to be a good engineer. (shrink)

According to a recent challenge to Kratzer's canonical contextualist semantics for deontic modal expressions, no contextualist view can make sense of cases in which such a modal must be information-sensitive in some way. Here I show how Kratzer's semantics is compatible with readings of the targeted sentences that fit with the data. I then outline a general account of how contexts select parameter values for modal expressions and show, in terms of that account, how the needed, contextualist-friendly readings might plausibly (...) get selected in the challenge cases. (shrink)

A sentence's meaning may depend on the state of motion of the speaker. I argue that this context-sensitivity blocks the inference from special relativity to four-dimensionalism.

This work aims to contribute to the explanation of cognitive capacities that are essential to human intelligence: commonsense and situation holism. The attempt to explain them within the field of cognitive sciences raises a foundational challenge. How can human cognition distinguish what’s relevant and what’s not in an open-ended set of contexts? The challenge is characterized by a circularity. Potential solutions end up relying on the very capacity that they should be explaining, i.e. the sensitivity to what’s contextually relevant. (...) The argument here developed is an attempt to get out of this circularity. It is grounded on a bi-dimensional analysis of the problem. The first one is representational and is about how cognitive knowledge on what’s relevant can be stored. This dimension is related to the frame problem from artificial intelligence. I claim that this representational aspect of the issue can be neutralized by abandoning language-like representational schemes and sticking to a plurality of structural ones. They allow representational states to play a clear and non-trivial explanatory role while enabling a kind of representational productivity that is not bothered by the frame problem. The second dimension is the inferential one. It encompasses our relevance-sensitive inferential productivity, i.e. our capacity to efficiently infer what’s relevant in indefinitely many contexts, including ones we’ve never faced before. I argue that such relevance sensitivity cannot be neither innate, for innate mechanisms result in the aforementioned circularity, nor learned through innate mechanisms, for learning processes themselves rely on relevance sensitivity. The suggested alternative is that relevance sensitivity is a cognitive gadget. A kind of mental mechanism that is culturally, rather than genetically, inherited. This possibility is rendered plausible within Cecilia Heyes’ “cognitive gadgets” framework. She shows how developmental tweaks and biases culturally established can participate in the constitution of cognitive mechanisms. Thus, cultural elements can participate in human cognition not only as information sources, but also in the form of tweaks that bias the processing of that information towards what’s culturally established as contextually relevant. (shrink)

The rapid advancement in generative models, including Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs), Variational Autoencoders (VAEs), and diffusion models, has significantly enhanced our ability to create high-quality synthetic data. These models have been instrumental in various applications, ranging from data augmentation and simulation to the development of privacy-preserving solutions. However, the generation of synthetic data also raises critical privacy concerns, as there is potential for these models to inadvertently reveal sensitive information about individuals in the original datasets. This paper delves into the (...) intersection of generative models and data privacy, focusing on the development of techniques that safeguard privacy while ensuring the synthetic data produced remains meaningful and useful. We provide a comprehensive review of privacy-preserving strategies employed in the context of generative models. Key approaches discussed include differential privacy, which guarantees that the inclusion or exclusion of any individual data point does not significantly alter the output of a function; federated learning, which enables collaborative model training across decentralized data sources without sharing raw data; and secure multi-party computation (MPC), which allows for computations on encrypted data while preserving privacy. The paper evaluates these techniques in terms of their effectiveness, trade-offs, and integration challenges. (shrink)

This book investigates context-sensitivity in natural language by examining the meaning and use of a target class of theoretically recalcitrant expressions. These expressions – including epistemic vocabulary, normative and evaluative vocabulary, and vague language – exhibit systematic differences from paradigm context-sensitive expressions in their discourse dynamics and embedding properties. Many researchers have responded by rethinking the nature of linguistic meaning and communication. Drawing on general insights about the role of context in interpretation and collaborative action, I (...) develop an improved contextualist theory of CR-expressions within the classical truth-conditional paradigm: Discourse Contextualism. The aim of Discourse Contextualism is to derive the distinctive linguistic behavior of a CR-expression from a particular contextualist interpretation of an independently motivated formal semantics, along with general principles of interpretation and conversation. It is shown how in using CR-expressions, speakers can exploit their mutual grammatical and world knowledge, and general pragmatic reasoning skills, to coordinate their attitudes and negotiate about how the context should evolve. The book focuses primarily on developing a Discourse Contextualist semantics and pragmatics for epistemic modals. The framework is also applied to other categories of epistemic vocabulary, normative and evaluative vocabulary, and vague adjectives. Similarities/differences among these expressions, and among context-sensitive expressions more generally, have been underexplored. Accounts are developed of (e.g.) the role of presupposition in collaborative action and discourse; the interpretation of context-sensitive expressions in embedded contexts; interactions among logic, semantics, pragmatics, metasemantics, and substantive normative issues; the role of truth and truth-value intuitions in semantic theorizing; allegedly "subjective" attitude verbs such as 'find'; and vagueness ("Vagueness as Contextual Indecision"), which may be of broader interest. The development of Discourse Contextualism in this book sheds light on general features of meaning and communication, and the diverse ways context affects and is affected by uses of language. (shrink)

Modus ponens is the argument from premises of the form If A, then B and A to the conclusion B. Nearly all participants agree that the modus ponens conclusion logically follows when the argument appears in this Basic form. However, adding a further premise can lower participants’ rate of agreement—an effect called suppression. We propose a theory of suppression that draws on contemporary ideas about conditional sentences in linguistics and philosophy. Semantically, the theory assumes that people interpret an indicative conditional (...) as a context-sensitive strict conditional: true if and only if its consequent is true in each of a contextually determined set of situations in which its antecedent is true. Pragmatically, the theory claims that context changes in response to new assertions, including new conditional premises. Thus, the conclusion of a modus ponens argument may no longer be accepted in the changed context. Psychologically, the theory describes people as capable of reasoning about broad classes of possible situations, ordered by typicality, without having to reason about individual possible worlds. The theory accounts for the main suppression phenomena, and it generates some novel predictions that new experiments confirm. (shrink)

The classic formulation of causal decision theory (CDT) appeals to counterfactuals. It says that you should aim to choose an option that would have a good outcome, were you to choose it. However, this version of CDT faces trouble if the laws of nature are deterministic. After all, the standard theory of counterfactuals says that, if the laws are deterministic, then if anything—including the choice you make—were different in the present, either the laws would be violated or the distant past (...) would be changed. And as several authors have shown, it's easy to transform this upshot of the standard theory of counterfactuals into full-blown counterexamples to CDT. In response to these counterexamples, I argue here that the problem lies, not so much with CDT's guiding idea—that it's the expected causal consequences of your actions that matter for rational decision-making—but with the fact that the classic formulation of CDT doesn't pay sufficient attention to the context-sensitivity of counterfactuals. I develop a contextualist version of CDT which better accounts for this context-sensitivity. And I show that my theory avoids the problems faced by the classic formulation of CDT in determinstic worlds. (shrink)

This paper presents a series of studies (total N=579) which demonstrate that folk judgments concerning the reasonableness of decisions and actions depend strongly on whether they engender positive or negative consequences. A particular decision is deemed more reasonable in retrospect when it produces beneficial consequences than when it produces harmful consequences, even if the situation in which the decision was taken and the epistemic circumstances of the agent are held fixed across conditions. This finding is worrisome for the law, where (...) the reasonable person standard plays a prominent role. The legal concept of reasonableness is outcome-insensitive: whether the defendant acted in a reasonable fashion or not depends exclusively on her context of action, no matter how things play out. Folk judgments of reasonableness are thus inconsistent with the legal concept of reasonableness. Problematically, in common law jurisdictions, the decision whether a defendant’s behavior was reasonable or not is frequently (though not necessarily) delegated to a lay jury. (shrink)

Counterfactuals are context-sensitive. However, we argue that various debates and doctrines in metaphysics and the philosophy of science are premised on ignoring the full extent of counterfactual context-sensitivity. Our focus is on the prominent "miracle" versus "no-miracle" debate about counterfactuals under the assumption that our laws of nature are deterministic. But we also discuss doctrines that employ counterfactuals in theories of rational decision, as well as doctrines that explain what it is to be a law of nature (...) in terms of counterfactuals. We conclude by drawing some morals about the use of counterfactuals in philosophical theorizing more generally. (shrink)

We propose a framework that makes space for both non-indexical contextualism and assessment-sensitivity. Such pluralism is motivated by considering possible variance in judgments about retraction. We conclude that the proposed pluralism, instead of problematizing, vindicates defining truth of a proposition w.r.t. a context of utterance and a context of assessment. To implement this formally, we formalize initialization of parameters by contexts. Then, a given parameter, depending on a speaker's judgment, can get initialized by either the context (...) of utterance or the context of assessment. An upshot of the proposal is that one need not exclusively espouse one of non-indexical contextualism or assessment-sensitivity about a particular class of expressions, for instance predicates of personal taste, in language; one can be pluralist in this sense. (This manuscript is part of an ongoing research project). (shrink)

This paper explores various subtleties in our ordinary thought and talk about normative reasons—subtleties which, if taken seriously, have various upshots, both substantive and methodological. I focus on two subtleties in particular. The first concerns the use of reason (in its normative sense) as both a count noun and as a mass noun, and the second concerns the context-sensitivity of normative reasons-claims. The more carefully we look at the language of reasons, I argue, the clearer its limitations and (...) liabilities become. The cumulative upshot is that although talk of reasons is intelligible and useful for the purposes of communication, we should be wary of placing much weight on it when engaging in substantive normative inquiry. By way of illustration, I consider some potential pitfalls of taking our talk of reasons too seriously, explaining how careful attention to the language of reasons undermines the main argument for moral particularism, Mark Schroeder’s recent defense of Humeanism about practical reasons, and the “reasons-first” program in metanormativity. (shrink)

According to the interpretational theory of logical validity (IR), logical validity is preservation of truth in all interpretations compatible with the intended meaning of logical expressions. IR suffers from a seemingly defeating objection, the so-called cardinality problem: any instance of the statement ‘There are n things’ is true under all interpretations, since it can be written down using only logical expressions that are not to be reinterpreted; yet ‘There are n things’ is not logically true. I argue that the cardinality (...) problem is indeed a serious problem for IR, when understood in terms of ‘asymmetry of information’. I then argue that IR can be rehabilitated by making quantifiers context-sensitive: what we do not reinterpret is the Kaplanian character of a quantifier, rather than its content. ‘There are n things’ is false in a context where fewer than n things are relevant, so it is not logically true in IR. I finally discuss some objections and ramifications of my account: I discuss how to make space for the possibility of an explicitly absolutely general quantifier in my framework, how terms can be logical even though context-sensitive, and how to recapture classical logic within my framework. (shrink)

The debate over Hypothetical Syllogism is locked in stalemate. Although putative natural language counterexamples to Hypothetical Syllogism abound, many philosophers defend Hypothetical Syllogism, arguing that the alleged counterexamples involve an illicit shift in context. The proper lesson to draw from the putative counterexamples, they argue, is that natural language conditionals are context-sensitive conditionals which obey Hypothetical Syllogism. In order to make progress on the issue, I consider and improve upon Morreau’s proof of the invalidity of Hypothetical Syllogism. The (...) improved proof relies upon the semantic claim that conditionals with antecedents irrelevant to the obtaining of an already true consequent are themselves true. Moreover, this semantic insight allows us to provide compelling counterexamples to Hypothetical Syllogism that are resistant to the usual contextualist response. (shrink)

What determines the meaning of a context-sensitive expression in a context? It is standardly assumed that, for a given expression type, there will be a unitary answer to this question; most of the literature on the subject involves arguments designed to show that one particular metasemantic proposal is superior to a specific set of alternatives. The task of the present essay will be to explore whether this is a warranted assumption, or whether the quest for the one true (...) metasemantics might be a Quixotic one. We argue that there are good reasons—much better than are commonly appreciated—for thinking the latter, but that there nevertheless remains significant scope for metasemantic theorizing. We conclude by outlining our preferred option, metasemantic pluralism. (shrink)

The meaning that expressions take on particular occasions often depends on the context in ways which seem to transcend its direct effect on context-sensitive parameters. ‘Truth-conditional pragmatics’ is the project of trying to model such semantic flexibility within a compositional truth-conditional framework. Most proposals proceed by radically ‘freeing up’ the compositional operations of language. I argue, however, that the resulting theories are too unconstrained, and predict flexibility in cases where it is not observed. These accounts fall into this (...) position because they rarely, if ever, take advantage of the rich information made available by lexical items. I hold, instead, that lexical items encode both extension and non-extension determining information. Under certain conditions, the non-extension determining information of an expression e can enter into the compositional processes that determine the meaning of more complex expressions which contain e. This paper presents and motivates a set of type-driven compositional operations that can access non-extension determining information and introduce bits of it into the meaning of complex expressions. The resulting multidimensional semantics has the tools to deal with key cases of semantic flexibility in appropriately constrained ways, making it a promising framework to pursue the project of truth-conditional pragmatics. (shrink)

The most familiar philosophical conception of objective chance renders determinism incompatible with non-trivial chances. This conception – associated in particular with the work of David Lewis – is not a good fit with our use of the word ‘chance’ and its cognates in ordinary discourse. In this paper we show how a generalized framework for chance can reconcile determinism with non-trivial chances, and provide for a more charitable interpretation of ordinary chance-talk. According to our proposal, variation in an admissible ‘evidence (...) base’ generates a spectrum of different chance functions. Successive coarse-grainings of the evidence base generates a partial ordering of chance functions, with finer trumping coarser if known. We suggest that chance-attributions in ordinary discourse express different chance functions in different contexts, and we sketch a potential contextual mechanism for making particular chance functions salient. The mechanism involves the idea that admissible evidence is available evidence: propositions that could be known. A consequence is that attributions of objective chances inherit the relatively familiar context-sensitivity associated with the modal ‘could’. We show how this context-dependency undermines certain arguments for the incompatibility of chance with determinism. (shrink)