contextualism

The concept of love for God in the works of Ruzbihan Baqli is not a merely conceptual or abstract expression. Rather, it is the result of encountering and experiencing God in beautiful imagery and accompanied by ecstatic states. Although he always emphasizes the transcendence and purity of God's essence and rejects anthropomorphism (tashbih) and corporealism (tajsim), from a structuralist perspective on religious experiences, the realization of this experience is compatible with contexts such as aestheticism, the Ashʿari belief in divine vision (ruʾya), and the Sufi concept of iltibas. Ruzbihan considers beauty to be the object of love, and in divine love, beauty in its sensory sense takes precedence and is not interpreted in other terms such as goodness or perfection. As an Ashʿari, he believes in the possibility of seeing God. The Ashʿari God, transcendent of logical laws, is capable of any action and thus, while being transcendent in existence, can descend to the realm of human perception and knowledge. According to the Sufi theory of iltibas, divine lordship can manifest in objects and visible forms, although this manifestation is epistemological rather than ontological. From the totality of these contexts, love for God is interpreted in its conventional, interpersonal sense and the result of a personal experience. The analysis of the meaningfulness of love for God, considering its experiential nature and its contexts, is one of the findings of the present paper

Inspired by linguistic and pragmatic turn, Richard Rorty suggests a contextualist interpretation of relation between truth and justification, and refuses any substantive function of such concepts as reality, truth, and justification beyond totally context-bounded justificatory practices . In contrast, in spite of coming to terms with Rorty’s neo-pragmatism , Hilary Putnam believes his naturalistic approach is uncapable to explain the transcendent character of such important concepts as truth and justification. He also questions Rorty’s exclusively sociological attitude toward justification which makes a nonsense of any reform or progress in the transformation of justificatory practices. In this essay, I would try to show that how Putnam’s criticisms, founded on irreducibility of the normative to the natural, leads Rorty to leave his overtly fervent naturalism found in his early work, and persuades him to insist on a vocabulary pluralism.

Metaethical relativism is in the first place a theory about the ontological status of moral properties and the truth and justification of ethical judgments. Since truth-ascriptions of relative judgments are different from ordinary sentences, relativists should advance a semantic theory about how the content and truth of such sentences are determined. Contextualist take such sentences to be elliptic for a sentence containing a parameter that refers to a reference frame determined by the context of assertion. With the content of different assertions of a judgment varying from one context to other, contextualists are bound to consider the apparently genuine faultless disagreements, which are a main motivation for accepting moral relativism, as mere misunderstandings. Also, they are faced with other problems in pragmatics of moral assertions in cases of retraction and rejection. By refuting contextualism, “New relativists” claim that it is just the truth of moral judgments that is relative, and the content of such judgments does not vary among their different assertions. John MacFarlane makes such a move by adding an index to the circumstances of evaluation of such judgments which is determined by context of assessment, and refers to assessors' preferences. In his de se relativism about values, Andy Egan presents a different theory, which he claims it to be the best if we were inclined to adopt naturalism, internalism, and cognitivism. By accepting David Lewis' theory of de se attitudes, which considers content of sentences to be properties instead of propositions, Egan claims that the value judgments have centered world properties as contents which have no corresponding possible world propositions.  By making value judgments, people self-ascribe such properties. Using Lewis' theory of value, Egan claims that the content of value properties is “being disposed to desire to desire x”. This property does not vary among different assertions of a sentence. Combining this theory with Robert Stalnaker's theory of assertion, Egan claims that he is not faced with the problem of lost disagreement. Like MacFarlane, Egan adds an assessor index to the circumstances of evaluation of relative sentences, but unlike him he claims it to be determined by the context of use. In addition, Egan makes two criticisms against the contextualist account of value judgments, which we have called the naturalist and the internalist problems. Both problems stem from the fact that according to contextualism, an assertion of some content can be evaluative while another assertion of the same content is non-evaluative. Egan claims that his account can avoid such problems. In the present paper, we show that Egan's attempts are unsuccessful. His account is faced with the same criticisms he leveled at contextualism; and if he tries to avoid such objections, his escape routes will open the way for contextualists as well. Also, by accepting Lewis' theory of content, Egan has taken on an additional burden, which is hard to defend.

This article investigates and evaluates models of the unity of science in 20th century. In general, the models of unity of science could be divided into two parts and investigated separately. The first group are models which defend reductionism and eliminativism by relying on physicalism. The second group are the ones that by relying on methodology try to guarantee the unity of science. In evaluating the first group on the works of Thomas Nagle and William James it is argued that these models not adjusted to different ontological fields. The various methods of scientific research and different function of the values of preferring a theory in different contexts of comparison also undermine the claim of scientific unity in the second group models. Anyway, for avoiding the harmful result of the being incommensurable, relying on holism the possibility of giving a model of the unity of science could be defended which has provided possibility of interdisciplinary cooperation and defies any attempt for reductionism or ignorance of the plurality of methods.

Richard Paul is a renowned thinker in the field of critical thinking who believes in the implementation of critical thinking in human decisions and actions. By analyzing reasoning and thinking, he found certain ideas that turned out to be significant in analyzing thinking. Here his contextualism is blatant which along with foundationalism and coherenticism seem to be a kind of reaction to skepticism. From this perspective, in epistemology, there is a turn towards social contexts. In this way, contextualism enjoys certain contextual elements such as actions, social relations, culture, and other human situations in justifying a belief or vice versa. Context, in this sense, can formulate Paul’s inclination towards textulism, pluralism, and relativism. The main objective of the present work is to explore the consequences of Richard Paul’s theory. Resolving the problem of contextualism by critical thinking is one of the Paul’s innovations that so far has remained unnoticed. So universal attention towards his ideas made this research necessary for analyzing his views. According to this research, Paul has succeeded to follow a moderate method that contains in itself certain universal standards which at the same time attended to context. Consequently, in his fair-minded critical thinking, Paul has sought to be saved from falling into reductionism, and in this way he has succeeded to reduce the consequences of contextualism.

Contextualism is the main opponent of minimalism. The debate between these two semantical approaches, stem in an old fashion dispute to determine the border between semantics and pragmatics. Contextualists claim that the sentences in the natural language are not truth-evaluable before being enriched pragmatically. In contrast, in minimalists’ viewpoint, there is a minimal semantic content that provides the truth-evaluable meaning of sentences in a way that context of utterance has limited effects on it. This contrast is based on the way and extent to which context affects semantic content. In this paper, after introducing these two approaches, the main arguments of contextualists against minimalist are discussed, then we show that minimalistic semantics like Kaplan's LD with objective interpretation of context cannot present any proper model even for sentences containing first-person reference, and on the basis of a subjective interpretation of context, the indexical/non-indexical distinction is not clear and other expressions of natural languages can be indexical, in a broad sense.

Putnam''s 1960 article، «Minds and Machines»، sketched a novel approach to the mind based on the analogy between mental states and logical-computational state of Turing machine، which later acknowledged as functionalism. Based on his interpretation of the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger، Dreyfus criticized Putnam’s functionalist-computationalist approach to the mind in an article directly addressing to him. In both physical and psychological-phenomenological level، Dreyfus proposes that mind can’t be understood as Turing machine which works with formal rules and in which inputs and outputs are context-free and independent of environment. About three decades after his article «minds and machines»، according to Carnap’s failure to formulate induction and Quine’s holism and also based on his semantic externalism، Putnam rejected his functionalist-computationalist approach and accepted an externalist-contextualist approach. Although Putnam does not mention the name of Dreyfus، his criticism to reject functionalism was obviously resembling the one Dreyfus stated previously contrary to the functionalism. In this paper، in order to reconstruct the critical dialogue between Dreyfus and Putnam، first، functionalism is formulated in the works of Putnam. After that، the phenomenological critique of Dreyfus to Putnam is stated. Then، it is shown that the causes of Putnam’s turning from functionalism to contextual point of view were thoroughly similar to Dreyfus’s critics to him. Last، it is shown that based on this turning from functionalism to contextualism، physicalism as a theory of mind is challenged and instead “subject in the world” provides a better model of the mind. Keywords Turing machine; atomism; mind; functionalism; contextualism From Functionalism To Contextualism: Reconstructing Dialogue Between Dreyfus And Putnam Article 6، Volume 41، Issue 2، Winter 2014، Page 103-120 XML PDF (319 K) Document Type: Research Paper Authors 1Mohammad Hosein Mohammad ALI Khalaj; 2Mohammad Taghi Tabaatabaayi 1M. A in philosophy، University Of Tehran 2Assistant Professor Of Philosophy، Institute For Humanities and Cultural Studies (IHCS) Abstract Putnam''s 1960 article، «Minds and Machines»، sketched a novel approach to the mind based on the analogy between mental states and logical-computational state of Turing machine، which later acknowledged as functionalism. Based on his interpretation of the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger، Dreyfus criticized Putnam’s functionalist-computationalist approach to the mind in an article directly addressing to him. In both physical and psychological-phenomenological level، Dreyfus proposes that mind can’t be understood as Turing machine which works with formal rules and in which inputs and outputs are context-free and independent of environment. About three decades after his article «minds and machines»، according to Carnap’s failure to formulate induction and Quine’s holism and also based on his semantic externalism، Putnam rejected his functionalist-computationalist approach and accepted an externalist-contextualist approach. Although Putnam does not mention the name of Dreyfus، his criticism to reject functionalism was obviously resembling the one Dreyfus stated previously contrary to the functionalism. In this paper، in order to reconstruct the critical dialogue between Dreyfus and Putnam، first، functionalism is formulated in the works of Putnam. After that، the phenomenological critique of Dreyfus to Putnam is stated. Then، it is shown that the causes of Putnam’s turning from functionalism to contextual point of view were thoroughly similar to Dreyfus’s critics to him. Last، it is shown that based on this turning from functionalism to contextualism، physicalism as a theory of mind is challenged and instead “subject in the world” provides a better model of the mind.

The domination of propositional logic in Wittgenstein’s philosophical manner in Tractatus which is revealed in the conceptions of picture, representation and correspondence on one hand, and analytical philosophy and its scientific, anti-metaphysics and logic-oriented content on the other hand, challenges Wittgenstein’s historic approach and his attention towards common hermeneutical concepts, whereas historical indications in the later Wittgenstein’s contextualistic manner namely custom, game and rule, culture and common language legitimize his slight historicism. On the contrary, history is one of the pillars in Gadamer’s hermeneutical system in which the relation with temporality and tradition is obvious. Finally, regardless of irrefutable conceptual diversion, the emphasis on the dimensions of the above mentioned of contextualism resulted in relative convergence between later Wittgenstein and Gadamer’s thought in this domain.

One of the demonstrations presented to prove God’s existence and rationality of religious beliefs is known as ‘Pascal’s wager’. William James has reviewed this demonstration and has presented a new account of it. According to his opinion we do not always form and accept our beliefs based on mere rational reasons; rather in many cases our will and feelings determine the direction of our beliefs. He believes that religious beliefs are among these cases as well. Criticizing skepticism and suspension of propositions on religious beliefs, James believes although the questions and problems related to accepting or rejecting religious beliefs might be rationally unanswered and without a final response such that we cannot take a definite rational position about them, but in practice and considering our emotional needs and the demands of our willing and emotive nature, they are among genuine and real choices which are living, unavoidable and momentous and we cannot be indifferent to them; rather we should study them considering the needs of our emotive and willing nature, if they are in accordance with our wills and pleasures we should accept them and otherwise we should reject them. James’ view has been criticized. Some of the most important criticisms of William James’ account of ‘Pascal’s wager’ are as follows: having an instrumental look at truth, accepting cognitive volitionaism, contradiction in ethical objectivism, paying attention to the profit of this world and ambiguity of concepts such as emotion and feelings.