July 18, 2011.
What does “conversational context” mean?
The situation in which a discourse takes place. Not just surrounding material but also the attitudes of the speakers, their interests, the point of what they’re trying to say, etc.
E.g. “everyone has arrived” or “there’s no beer”
The context constrains “everyone who was invited” / “no beer in the fridge”
Can we make everything explicit?
To make things explicit you draw from the context you are in
It’s an illusion to think we can speak “purely”
It’s essential for us to draw on info that is salient to the person we talk to
A big question for theorists: how is what is said in a statement dependent on context?
Under what possible worlds / conditions is what you say true?
Information conveyed by a statement is the exclusion of possible worlds.
“The cup is on the table” rules out the set of worlds in which the cup is under the table, etc.
If the cup gets moved, the three people in the room know both that it was moved and that the three people all know this fact, so it can then be taken for granted / it becomes part of the context.
If I respond to “everyone’s here” with “really? the queen is here?” that means I have included a possible world that the speaker had already ruled out.
A defective / mismatched context
So the possible worlds are used in multiple places
I say “he is over there” and you need to know what possible worlds are available as context to know who I refer to (suppose it’s John), but also now that you know that it affects the meaning what I’m saying (it rules out worlds wheree John is somewhere else)
The information content of the sentence is not just contained in the sentence itself. We can’t just isolate the context-dependent components by picking out indexicals.
Set of problems in philosophy: “essentially indexical belief”
Know objective facts but can’t locate oneself w/r/t to those facts
“I know I’m here” but I don’t know where here is.
There are thoughts that we can only have using indexicals (meaning changes when substituted).
“Frege problems”
When the same thing is named in two different ways. E.g. Hespherus and Phosphorus.
It was an empirical discovery that these two names named the same thing. Knowing that fact changes the meanings of sentences, even without indexicals.
Science gives you language for talking about a way for talking about the world in a fairly objective way, but there are still named terms that get their reference via naming processes.
Worry about realism. Is there something anti-realist about this kind of contextualism?
We can talk about the world only by connecting ourselves to it.
That’s no threat to the fact we are stating objective truths/falsehoods.
We can distinguish between the possible worlds with our contexts and be objectively right or wrong.
Use case of contextualism
Contextual theories can be used to address skeptical claims (“to know” is context dependent)
In politically contested discourse, context can be deliberately exploited to manipulate / control the discourse.
Radical contextualism gives us a means of knowing how to gain clarification in these situations.