Contextualism

Contextualism is the view in philosophy of language and epistemology that the meaning, truth conditions, or justification of a statement depend on the context in which it is uttered. In semantics, contextualism challenges the compositionality principle by arguing that the meaning of a sentence is not fully determined by the meanings of its parts and their syntactic arrangement; rather, contextual factors — speaker intentions, shared background knowledge, conversational goals — penetrate semantic content at every level. Charles Travis and John Perry have argued that the same sentence can express different propositions in different contexts, not merely because of indexicals like 'I' or 'here,' but because the very semantic values of predicates shift with context. This challenges the Fregean ideal of a language whose semantics is fixed and context-independent. In epistemology, contextualism holds that the standards for knowing something vary with the conversational context: 'I know the bank is open' may be true in casual conversation and false in a high-stakes planning session. The unifying thread is the claim that context is not a layer added to content but a dimension that shapes content from the inside out.