Contextualist Approach Research Articles

Paradoxes and the limits of theorizing about propositional attitudes

Propositions are central to at least most theorizing about the connection between our mental lives and the world: we use them in our theories of an array of attitudes including belief, desire, hope, fear, knowledge, and understanding. Unfortunately, when we press on these theories, we encounter a relatively neglected family of paradoxes first studied by Arthur Prior. I argue that these paradoxes present a fatal problem for most familiar resolutions of paradoxes. In particular, I argue that truth-value gap, contextualist, situation theoretic, revision theoretic, ramified, and dialetheist approaches to the paradoxes must deny us the conceptual resources that they themselves make use of, on pain of contradiction (though contradiction need not be painful for dialetheism). I then detail the costs of the extant strategies that avoid this issue: Hartry Field’s paracomplete approach; Andrew Bacon’s classical treatment of indeterminacy; a generalization of ideas from Prior, Nicholas J.J. Smith, and Hartley Slater; and free logics as recently explored by Bacon, John Hawthorne, and Gabriel Uzquiano. I argue that none of these is perfect, and that each restricts the theories we can endorse in a variety of areas of philosophy. I spell these restrictions out, showing, I hope, that the further investigation of these paradoxes must be a part of future research on propositional attitudes.

Understanding Courts in Context:

Are the numerous judicial bodies that we tend to very generally subsume under “international courts” or “international adjudicative bodies” really like-units, or are they rather highly diverse institutions that call for a more careful, not only typological, but also theoretical differentiation? The aim of this article is to make a theoretically grounded contribution to the questions of (a) in what ways international judicial institutions are dependent on the functionally differentiated settings they are embedded in, and (b) in what ways they are influenced and altered by the organisational frameworks of their operation. The starting point of the inquiry will be a critical discussion of systems theory and rationalist approaches, as these approaches involve opposite positions with regards to the embeddedness and interaction of judicial bodies in a functionally differentiated world society: while the former entails an exclusive logic, the latter is essentially based on an inclusive model. The claim is that both models enable us to better understand rather ideal-type cases of how judicial institutions (inter)act in practice. It will be argued that the modus operandi of diverse courts, (arbitral) tribunals, and quasi-judicial institutions is typically subtler and more complex and can be most likely understood – due to their entanglement with other functional settings – as being transclusive or substitutive in nature. Both concepts will be introduced and applied here as parts of a contextualist approach towards understanding international judicial institutions.

MEMBINCANG PENDEKATAN KONTEKSTUALIS ABDULLAH SAEED DALAM MEMAHAMI AL-QUR’AN

Qur’anic studies never ends. It is done by both intellectual moslems and orientalists (non moslem). Abdullah Saeed, an intellectual moslem who lives in non moslem area (Australia), is one of those who studies Qur’an deeply. To understand and interpret Qur’an contextually, he offers an approach called contextualist approach. Then, Saeed also makes hierarchy of values taken from Qur’anic verses. This is known that not all verses must be conformed to place and time, but some should be understood and interpreted universally. While others depend on place and time (particularly). The steps of interpreting, called model of interpretation by Saeed, with contextualist approach encounter with the world of the text, critical analysis, meaning for the first recipients, and meaning for the present. an example of Saeed’s interpretation of the verses about usury connected to interest is given in the last of this article.

Rescuing Objectivity: A Contextualist Proposal

Ascriptions of objectivity carry significant weight. But they can also cause confusion because wildly different ideas of what it means to be objective are common. Faced with this, some philosophers have argued that objectivity should be eliminated. I will argue, against one such position, that objectivity can be useful even though it is plural. I will then propose a contextualist approach for dealing with objectivity as a way of rescuing what is useful about objectivity while acknowledging its plurality.

Catching a rabbit with a tetrahedron: A contextualist approach

A defining characteristic of Jim Jenkins’ long and productive research career was his ability to reconcile contradictory experimental evidence within a coherent conceptual framework that leads to novel insights and experimental approaches. Grounded in the deep knowledge of history of psychology, Jim’s involvement and expertise in different aspects of human behavior, including language, speech, memory, attention, visual, and auditory perception, resulted in important theoretical breakthroughs (and countless stimulating discussions). One such work is the tetrahedral model of memory experiments. It considers four large clusters of experimental variables: subjects, materials, scoring tasks, and testing procedures, whose mutual interactions determine experimental outcomes. [J.J. Jenkins “Four points to remember: A tetrahedral model of memory experiments,” in Levels of Processing in Human Memory, ed. LS Cermak, FIM Craik, (1979)]. Initially proposed to account for inconsistent findings of memory experiments, the model's applications have expanded to other areas of perceptual training and education as a guide to maximize learning outcomes. Following Jim’s lead, I will illustrate how the tetrahedral model can (1) improve the understanding of research findings from two ecologically significant sound classes, speech and environmental sounds, in normal hearing and cochlear implant listeners, and (2) guide the design of effective auditory training programs.

Dompter Prométhée: Technologies et socialismes à l’âge romantique, 1820–1870 ed. by François Jarrige

Reviewed by: Dompter Prométhée: Technologies et socialismes à l’âge romantique, 1820–1870 ed. by François Jarrige John Pannabecker (bio) Dompter Prométhée: Technologies et socialismes à l’âge romantique, 1820–1870. Edited by François Jarrige. Besançon: Presses Universitaires de Franche-Comté, 2016. Pp. 286. €15. “Taming Prometheus” would be one way to translate this volume’s title, but it would fall short of representing its complex orientation, which includes notions of mastering, governing, regulating, engineering, and reinventing technology. This book should be of special interest to historians of technology, because its contextualist approach shows how early socialists included technology as central to their agenda of social reflection and designing a more human-centered future through technological artifacts and practices. France is the geographic focus, with the exception of a chapter on Robert Owen’s involvement in the New Lanark mills in Scotland starting in 1800, and a chapter on influences on Marx, especially Andrew Ure, Charles Babbage, and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Dompter Prométhée grew out of a colloquium at the University of Bourgogne (Dijon) in June 2013 within the framework of project ANR (Agence Nationale de la Recherche) “Utopies 19.” The authors are historians of socialism, science/technology, or their intersections. François Jarrige’s forty-seven-page essay introduces the fundamental tensions and ambiguities of early socialist critiques of industry and technology as both cause and remedy of human misfortunes. The neologisms “technology” and “socialism” both appeared between the end of the eighteenth and middle of the nineteenth centuries, and their borders long remained porous and uncertain (p. 21). The authors explore these borders, showing how different socialist engineers, technicians, and workers developed ideas, tools, and artifacts, introduced inventions, experimented with new technical processes, and stimulated debates about technologies within the context of social, political, and economic transformations (p. 15). In the postface, Liliane Hilaire-Pérez borrows as title Gilbert Simondon’s phrase “saving the technical object” to reflect on intersections between the socialist paths analyzed by the authors and Simondon’s more recent theory of progress as a slowdown and more efficient energy usage (p. 263). Simondon (1924–89), a French philosopher of technology, focused on how to reconcile culture, technology, and new forms of alienation in opposition to simplistic, technophobic, humanistic stances. The title’s reference to technologies and socialisms of the “romantic age” invites readers to explore the ambiguities and uncertainties of a time during which the increasingly mechanized, quantified, and utilitarian world of industry has been typically represented in opposition to a beautiful and impractical world of art and literature. The authors have done an admirable job of undermining such a simplistic view. Indeed, socialists often [End Page 196] represented machines as potential generators of a more progressive future, as illustrated by Ophélie Siméon’s analysis of Robert Owen’s New Lanark; John Tresch’s discussion of the divine motors of the Saint-Simonians; Joost Mertens’s account of Étienne Cabet’s technocratic ideals in his utopian vision; Ludovic Frobert’s study of Constantin Pecqueur and steam technology; Georges Ribeill’s analysis of socialist approaches to the railroad; François Jarrige’s review of the failed pianotype in the typographical world; Thomas Bouchet’s consideration of Charles Fourier, phalansterians, and communications systems; Bernard Desmars’s inventory of phalansterian inventors; and Keith Tribe’s critical analysis of socialist writings on technology that influenced Marx. In many ways, this volume represents a model of integration of technology and culture that editors and publishers of multi-author works should consider. A minor shortcoming is that the central period treated is the July Monarchy (1830–48). There is less than balanced coverage over the title’s timeframe of 1820–70, with several exceptions, such as Robert Owen’s work at New Lanark from 1800–25. Non-francophone readers, especially those less familiar with French history and culture, would have benefited from more biographical and historical context. The volume’s emphasis on ambiguities, tensions, and uncertainties is definitely a strength, but could have been developed more systematically across chapters in regard to the roles of workers and artisans. Nevertheless, the book achieves its goals at a very high level. It...

Paradoxes and Restricted Quantification

Andrew Bacon, John Hawthorne, and Gabriel Uzquiano (Bacon, Hawthorne, and Uzquiano 2016) have recently argued that free logics—logics that reject or restrict Universal Instantiation—are ultimately not promising approaches to resolving a family of intensional paradoxes due to Arthur Prior (Prior 1961). These logics encompass ramified and contextualist approaches to paradoxes, and broadly speaking, there are two kinds of criticism they face. First, they fail to address every version of the Priorean paradoxes. Second, the theoretical considerations behind the logics make absolutely general statements about all propositions, properties of propositions, etc., but because this sort of intensional quantification is always restricted in the logics, they cannot even express those considerations. I present a novel sort of free logic, which rejects the standard Universal Instantiation but validates a restricted form of the rule, and which addresses both kinds of criticism by allowing some propositions to be unrestricted in their quantification.

Vignettes of Buddhist Asceticism: Jottings on Six Fragments in Tocharian B*

This paper consists of a disquisition on six fragments of an otherwise unknown text in Tocharian B, which centers on the Buddhist purification practices known as Skt. dhutaguṇa or Pāli dhutaṅga. Adopting a contextualist approach to the fragmentary text, which is translated and annotated in its entirety for the first time, this study draws on numerous textual sources and ethnographic records with reference to kindred ideas and praxis in various strands of Buddhism and, it is hoped, sheds new light not only on the content and structure of this text per se but also on the religio-historical context in which it was transmitted, and its function and purpose in that milieu.

Objective Plain Meaning in Common Law Contracts

Courts and scholars disagree about the quantum of evidence that is necessary to determine the meaning of contractual provisions. Formalists favor excluding extrinsic evidence unless the contractual text is found to be ambiguous. Contextualists, by contrast, look to extrinsic evidence to support claims about contractual meaning even absent a finding of ambiguity. The formalist approach is faulted for failing to provide a meaningful account of the parties’ intentions and for placing heavy reliance upon the judge’s own linguistic intuitions and general-use English dictionaries—both problematic guides to plain meaning. At the same time, the contextualist approach may impose significant costs on the contracting parties and invite strategic behavior. Corpus linguistics offers a middle way. Corpus linguistics draws on evidence of language use from large, coded, electronic collections of natural language—language used in natural settings, rather than language elicited through interviews or surveys. These may include collections of texts from newspapers, magazines, academic articles, or transcribed conversations. These collections of texts are referred to as corpora (the plural of corpus). Linguistic corpora can be designed to model the linguistic conventions of a wide variety of speech communities, industries, or linguistic registers. Because large, sophisticated linguistic corpora are freely available, language evidence from linguistic corpora offers a comparatively low-cost alternative to the vast quantity of extrinsic evidence permitted by contextualist interpretive approaches. Moreover, by evaluating corpus evidence, judges and lawyers can create a more accurate, evidence-based picture of contractual meaning than can be found in the formalist judge’s linguistic intuition or in a general-use dictionary. Moreover, corpora can provide objective evidence of the linguistic conventions of the communities that draft and are governed by the agreements judges and lawyers are called upon to interpret. Corpus evidence can give content to otherwise vague legal concepts and provide linguistic evidence to aid in the evaluation of claims about the meaning (or ambiguity) of a contractual text. Below I outline how corpus linguistic methods may be applied to the interpretation of contracts.

REFLEKSI ABDULLAH SAEED TENTANG PENDEKATAN KONTEKSTUAL TERHADAP AYAT-AYAT ETHICO-LEGAL DALAM ALQURAN

Awareness of the relationship between text, context and interpreters always experiences dynamics from time to time. From the classical to contemporary times, every interpreter always tries to present the results of interpretations that give benefit to anyone. The same is true for contextual interpreters, such as Fazlur Rahman, Amina Wadud, Muhammad Syahrur, and Khaled Abou El Fadl who will be briefly reviewed in this article. This article is the result of Abdullah Saeed's reflection on four contemporary commentators in interpreting the verses of legal ethics. Abdullah Saeed is an Australian scientist from the Maldives. Abdullah Saeed is also present to give a new color in understanding the Qur'an by taking into account the context of the revelation and context when the Qur'an was interpreted. This article is adapted from Abdullah Saeed's article entitled "Some Reflections on the Contextualist Approach to Ethico-legal Texts of the Quran" which he published in the Bulletin of SOAS. Therefore, this article seeks to find the vertices of Abdullah Saeed's reflection on some contextualist thinking ideas.

Knowledge about our experience and distinguishing between possibilities

In my article I reconstruct the main threads of Robert Stalnaker’s book Our Knowledge of the Internal World, which focuses on the problem of our epistemic relation to our experience and the relation between experience and knowledge. First, the book proposes an interesting view of externalism, which combines classical externalist claims with a contextualist approach to content ascriptions. The approach accommodates some important internalist intuitions by showing how content ascriptions can be sensitive to the perspective from which a subject perceives the world. Second, Stalnaker proposes a theory of self-locating and phenomenal knowledge, which should be understood in terms of differentiating between real possibilities. The puzzling upshot of this elegant solution is that it commits one to the existence of possibilities accessible only from the first-person perspective. Finally, Stalnaker presents an argument which shows that our knowledge about our phenomenal experience is no more direct than the knowledge about external objects. Stalnaker’s claim that by merely having an experience we don’t learn any new information seems, however, too strict in light of his contextualist approach to content ascriptions.

International intellectual history and International Relations: contexts, canons and mediocrities

This article reviews contextualist methods in intellectual history and discusses some of the specific challenges involved in their application to the study of International Relations (IR) and hence international intellectual history. While the broad thrust of these developments has been highly positive, the article argues that a distinction between classic and lesser works is a crucial part of the apparatus of the contextualist approach, which poses a problem in IR, where the idea of an established canon of great works has historically been less well developed than in the study of Political Theory or Law. As a result, the move towards contextualist methods of interpretation can force authors to restrict their focus onto a newly conceived, and somewhat narrow, canon, with a strongly political and legal flavour. The eclectic range of earlier, albeit less methodologically sophisticated, histories offer considerable resources for defining the scope of new empirical enquiries in international intellectual history, and the article concentrates on early modern journalism as an example of this opportunity.

Topos og motiv. Et forskningshistorisk rids

The aim of this article is to clarify how literary topology relates historically and conceptually to the study of literary motifs. Topos and motif are associated concepts in literary theory, but attempts to define and compare them are evasive and few. While literary topology was, according to Ernst Robert Curtius, founded on the basis of classical rhetoric and concerned primarily the literary tradition of rhetorical eloquence, the notion of motif was, as I will argue, on the contrary conceived as a critical term at a time when rhetoric was loosing its grip on literary criticism at the end of the 18th century. My article will survey a number of influential positions in the history of literary theory and criticism concerning the study of motifs and topoi from Goethe to contemporary contextualist approaches.

Examining social media adoption and change to the stakeholder communication paradigm in not-for-profit sport organizations

The purpose of this study was to examine social media adoption within not-for-profit sport organizations to illuminate the impetus for change, the type of change undertaken, and change resistance. Using a contextualist approach depicting the external and internal forces as well as the change process, semi-structured interviews were conducted with ten Canadian national sport organizations (NSO) representing varying degrees of social media presence. The findings suggest that, although social media is espoused as a radical, transformational vehicle, NSOs have only made incremental adjustments to their stakeholder communication and have situated social media within their extant organizational condition due to capacity constraints and resistance from staff and reticent stakeholders. Adopting social media in light of limited organizational capacity thus diminishes the utility of the communications tool. Theoretical and practical implications include how to improve social media-related capacity and the importance of continuing the social media and sport domain’s organizational theory agenda.

Implications Organisationnelles Et Humaines De L’introduction Des Tic Pour La Frh : -Cas De L’administration Publique Marocaine-

In this study we are interested in the organizational and human implications of ICTs especially for HRF as we see them as more crucial to the effectiveness of the organization as a whole. Mobilizing a contextualist approach, our contribution consists in reconsidering the field of study in order to integrate public administrations, which, like private companies, are strongly challenged by requirements of efficiency and effectiveness. We opted for a quantitative approach by administering a questionnaire to HR managers in about 40 public administrations and used various documents to enrich and complete the field study. The introduction of ICT in public administration has led to a reorganization of work and a change in working conditions, so the HRF becomes more flexible and communicative. However, interactive services and activities that contribute to skills development are scarce. An ICT culture based on the ethical sense and the mobilization of all the stakeholders is necessary for a complete success of the computerization project of the Public Administration.

Reading the Qur’an in the Twenty-first Century: A Contextualist Approach, by Abdullah Saeed

Reading the Qur’an in the Twenty-first Century: A Contextualist Approach, by Abdullah Saeed

The indeterminacy failures of moral cosmopolitanism and liberal nationalism

ABSTRACTMuch of the discussion on cosmopolitanism and nationalism has focused on their different normative views. The purpose of this article is to shift the attention away from the normative debate to the metatheoretical argument about how we determine moral and political principles independently of each other. I argue that the discussion among proponents of cosmopolitanism and contextualist models boils down to latent methodological and metatheoretical assumptions about what selection of facts are considered politically relevant. In the article, I explore what I call ‘the indeterminacy failure’ of moral cosmopolitanism, that is, the view according to which moral principles fail to determine what political-institutional level might be preferable; and the ‘indeterminacy failure’ of liberal nationalism, that is, the view according to which national identity fails to determine moral principles. In opposition to dichotomist cosmopolitan models (including various nonideal types of moral cosmopolitanism) and alternative contextualist approaches (including the practice-dependence thesis and liberal nationalism), I promote a ‘split-level’ model that is set to avoid the difficulties in the other approaches. The split-level corrects the indeterminacy failures of cosmopolitanism and contextualism by distinguishing clearly between the level of moral theorising and the level of political theorising.

Must We Embody Context?

The essays in this forum brace this meditation on the historiography of technology. Understanding devices incorporates the context of any particular hardware, as John Staudenmaier showed by quantifying the contents of the first decades of Technology and Culture. As contextualist approaches have widened from systems theory through social construction and into the assemblages of actor-network theory, the discipline has kept artifacts at the analytical center: it is the history of technology that scholars seek to understand. Even recognizing that the machine only embodies the technology, the discipline has long sought to explain the machine. These essays invite consideration of how the history of technology might apply to non-corporeal things-methods as well as machines, and all the worldly phenomena that function in technological ways even without physicality. Materiality is financial as well as corporeal, the history of capitalism reminds us, and this essay urges scholars to apply history-of-technology approaches more broadly.

Reading the Qurʾan in the Twenty-First Century: A Contextualist Approach, written by Abdullah Saeed

Reading the Qurʾan in the Twenty-First Century: A Contextualist Approach, written by Abdullah Saeed

Contextualism, Relativism and the Liar

Contextualist theories of truth appeal to context to solve the liar paradox: different stages of reasoning occur in different contexts, and so the contradiction is dispelled. The word ‘true’ is relativized by the contextualists to contexts of use. This paper shows that contextualist approaches to the liar are committed to a form of semantic relativism: that the truth value of some sentences depends on the context of assessment, as well as the context of use. In particular, it is shown how Simmons’s and Glanzberg’s contextualist approaches entail relativism. In both cases, the liar sentence gets different semantic evaluations as uttered in a fixed context of use but assessed from different contexts. Shift in context of use alone cannot provide the full explanation of the liar. These contextualist approaches, as originally presented, were thus mischaracterised and they should be re-evaluated according to their full implications.