We argue that four-dimensionalists should adopt a contextualist semantics, according to which ordinary speakers’ judgments may concern person-stages, person-segments or person-worms, depending on the context. We explain how context helps select the boundaries of the temporal parts we refer to or quantify over and show that contextualism offers the best treatment of ordinary predications and ordinary counting judgments. Contextualism implies an error theory; however, we explain why this error theory is less problematic than those entailed by the worm and stage (...) theories. (shrink)

Causal contextualism holds that sentences of the form ‘c causes e’ have context-sensitive truth-conditions. We consider four arguments invoked by Jonathan Schaffer in favor of this view. First, he argues that his brand of contextualism helps solve puzzles about transitivity. Second, he contends that how one describes the relata of the causal relation sometimes affects the truth of one’s claim. Third, Schaffer invokes the phenomenon of contrastive focus to conclude that causal statements implicitly designate salient alternatives to the cause and (...) effect. Fourth, he claims that the appropriateness of a causal statement depends on what is contextually taken for granted or made salient. We show that causal invariantism can explain these linguistic data at least as well as contextualism. We then argue that pace Schaffer, some causal sentences are always correct and can never be plausibly denied, regardless of the context. (shrink)

According to a popular objection against epistemic contextualism, contextualists who endorse the factivity of knowledge, the principle of epistemic closure and the knowledge norm of assertion cannot coherently defend their theory without abandoning their response to skepticism. After examining and criticizing three responses to this objection, we offer our own solution. First, we question the assumption that contextualists ought to be interpreted asassertingthe content of their theory. Second, we argue that contextualists need not hold that high epistemic standards govern contexts (...) in which they defend their theory. (shrink)