Allgemeine Informationen

Veranstaltungsart

Seminar

Semester

SoSe 2007

ECTS-Punkte

4

Veranstaltungsnummer

8.3047

Details

Link zur Veranstaltung in StudIP

Dozent*innen

• Prof. Dr. phil. Peter Bosch
• Prof. Dr. phil. Kai-Uwe Kühnberger

Beschreibung

"Contextualism" describes a collection of views in the philosophy of language, epistemology, and ethics, which emphasize the context in which an action, utterance, or expression occurs, and argues that, in some important respect, the action, utterance, or expression can only be understood relative to that context. Contextualist views hold that philosophically controversial concepts, such as "meaning P," "knowing that P," "having a reason to A," and possibly even "being true" or "being right" only have meaning relative to a specified context. (Wikipedia)

The current seminar will look, in particular, at contextualist views in epistemology and the philosophy of language (and, to some extent, the philosophy of mind). Contextualism would claim that there is no such thing as the "meaning" or "sense" of an expression. Expressions "mean" something only in particular contexts. Similarly, no proposition would be true as such, but could be true only relative to a whole context of (largely unarticulated) background assumptions. – At a first glace, such a position flies in the face of nearly all modern semantic theory: Truth-conditional semantics, extensionally or as possible world semantics, can't be right, if Contextualism is right.

Studienbereiche

• Cognitive Science > Master-Programm