The systematic elaboration of contextualism as a framework for understanding knowledge, truth, and meaning. Contextualist Theory argues that all cognitive claims are context-bound—that the conditions under which a claim is made, the purposes for which it's made, the audience to which it's addressed all shape what the claim means and whether it's true. It develops the implications of this insight across domains: epistemology (knowledge attributions vary with context), semantics (meaning varies with context), ethics (moral judgments vary with context). Contextualist Theory doesn't collapse into relativism because it recognizes that contexts are structured, that some contexts are more appropriate than others, that context-sensitivity is not arbitrariness.
Example: "He'd been frustrated by arguments that seemed to go nowhere. Contextualist Theory showed him why: each person was speaking from a different context, assuming their context was universal. The arguments weren't about truth; they were about which context should prevail. He stopped trying to prove his context right and started explaining where he was standing."
by Abzugal February 21, 2026
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