what does it mean to contextualize a thesis

Chapter 4: Writing the Methods Section

Methods Goal 1: Contextualize the Study’s Methods

The first goal of writing your Methods section is to contextualize (provide context or a “picture” of) the procedures you followed to conduct the research. Doing this requires attention to detail. Some of the possible ways that you can accomplish this goal will be discussed later in the chapter, but first, let’s look at some examples of Methods sections from published research articles in high-impact journals (the parts of the Methods that contain Goal 1 language are bolded ):

• Volumetric gas concentrations obtained from the gas analyzers were converted into mass concentrations with the ideal gas law by using the mean reactor room temperature and assuming one atmosphere pressure. Gas release is defined in this article as the process of gas transferring through the liquid manure surface into the free air stream of the reactor headspace. Gas emission is defined as the process of gas emanating from the reactor into the outdoor atmosphere. Gas release does not equal gas emission under transient conditions, although it does under steady-state conditions. The rate of gas emission from a reactor was calculated with equation 1: Equation (1) where QGe is gas emission rate (mass min-1), CGex is exhaust gas concentration (mass L-1), CGin is inlet gas concentration (mass L-1), and Qv is reactor airflow rate (L min-1). The gas release rate was approximated with the rates of change in gas mass in the reactor headspace with equation 2: Equation (2) where QGr is gas release rate (mass min-1), CGh is gas concentration in the headspace (mass L-1), and Vh is headspace air volume (L). In this article, we assumed that CGh was equal to CGex. To use the sampled data obtained in this study, equation 2 was discretized to equation 3: Equation (3) where __delta__t is sampling interval (min), and k is sample number (k = 0, 1, 2, … ). Gas release flux was calculated with equation 4: Equation (4) where qGr is gas release flux (mass m-2 in-1), and A is area of reactor manure surface (m2) . [1]
• The participants were employees of a medium-sized firm in the telecommunications industry. The sampling frame was the list of 3,402 potential users of the new ERP system. We received 2,794 usable responses across all points of measurement, resulting in an effective response rate of just over 82 percent. Our sample comprised 898 women (32 percent). The average age of the participants was 34.7, with a standard deviation of 6.9. All levels of the organizational hierarchy were adequately represented in the sample and were in proportion to the sampling frame. While ideally we would have wanted all potential participants to provide responses in all waves of the data collection, this was particularly difficult given that the study duration was 12 months and had multiple points of measurement. Thus, the final sample of 2,794 was determined after excluding those who did not respond despite follow-ups, those who had left the organization, those who provided incomplete responses, or who did not choose to participate for other reasons. Yet, we note that the response rate was quite high for a longitudinal field study; this was, in large part, due to the strong organizational support for the survey and the employees’ desire to provide reactions and feedback to the new system. Although we did not have any data from the non-respondents, we found that the percentage of women, average age, and percentages of employees in various organizational levels in the sample were consistent with those in the sampling frame. Employees were told that they would be surveyed periodically for a year in order to help manage the new ERP system implementation. Employees were told that the data would also be used as part of a research study and were promised confidentiality, which was strictly maintained . [2]

So, as you can see in the excerpts above, the writers are providing lots of detailed information that contextualizes the study. To contextualize methods means that you explain all of the conditions in which the study occurred. It might be helpful for you to think of answering the questions who, what, when, where, how,  and  why. 

Goal 1, Contextualizing the Study Methods, means that you completely describe the circumstances surrounding the research. There are several strategies you can use to help you successfully achieve this goal in a detailed manner.

Strategies for Methods Communicative Goal 1: Contextualizing the Study Methods

• Referencing previous works 
• Providing general information 
• Identifying the methodological approach
• Describing the setting 
• Introducing the subjects/participants 
• Rationalizing pre-experiment decisions

Methods Goal 1 Strategy: Referencing Previous Works

Referencing previous works is a strategy used to relate your research to the literature. The strategy involves a direct reference to another author or an explicit mention of a study.

Here are two examples taken from published research articles:

• The entire experiment consisted of six situations, and each situation was tested employing one advertisement. The balanced Latin-square method proposed by Edwards (1951) was used to arrange the six experimental situations. To simplify the respondents’ choices with regard to order and sequence, all of the print advertisements tested were appropriately arranged in the experimental design. [3]
• The Eulerian-granular model in ANSYS 12.0 was used to model the interactions between three phases: one gaseous phase and two granular particle phases within a fluidized bed taken from the literature [32] . This model was chosen over the Eulerian-Lagrangian models as it is computationally more efficient with regards to time and memory. [4]

Methods Goal 1 Strategy: Providing General Information

Providing general information allows a writer to give the background that is specific to the methods. This can be theoretical, empirical, informational, or experiential background to the methodology of the study. You can use this strategy to build a bridge for the reader. The bridge should connect your study to other studies that have utilized the same or similar methodology. This strategy also encompasses any preliminary hypotheses or interpretations that you may want to make.

• The animals used during this study were slaughtered in accredited slaughterhouses according to the rules on animal protection defined by French law (Code Rural, articles R214-64 to R214-71, http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr). The Qualvigene program, described in detail elsewhere (Allais et al., 2010), was a collaborative research program involving AI companies, INRA (the French National Institute for Agricultural Research) and the Institut de l’Elevage (Breeding Institute) in France. The program was initiated to study the genetic determinism of beef and meat quality traits (Malafosse et al., 2007). [5]
• This study focused on stemwood when examining alternative woody biomass management regimes for loblolly pine. PTAEDA3.1, developed with data from a wide range of loblolly pine plantations in the southern United States, was used to simulate growth as well as competition and mortality effects and predict yields of various management scenarios (Bullock and Burkhart 2003, Burkhart et al. 2004). [6]

Methods Goal 1 Strategy: Identifying the Methodological Approach

Identifying the methodological approach allows a writer to pinpoint the exact method that was adopted to accomplish the study’s goals. This is a strategy you would use if there was a specific set of procedures for your approach or, in some cases, even a predetermined framework for how to carry out the study. The main purpose of this step is to introduce the methodological approach or experimental design used for the current study to inform the reader of the selected approach, announce credible research practices known in the field, and possibly transition to describing the experimental procedures.

Consider the following examples:

• In both seasons, the experiments were arranged in a complete randomized block design with four replications, using a plot size of 3.45m x 15m each containing 114 plants. Three levels of organic supplementation [0 kgm-2 (S0), 0.35 kgm-2 (S0.35) and 0.70 kgm-2 (S0.70)] were incorporated into the soil 2 days before solarization. [7]
• To address these hypotheses rigorously, we conducted a randomized controlled trial with children clustered within schools. All three interventions were delivered by the same teaching assistant in each school. [8]

Methods Goal 1 Strategy: Describing the Setting

Describing the setting of the study is simply telling the reader about where or under what conditions the study happened. The setting  is all about the place ,  conditions, and  surroundings. In other words, this strategy details the characteristics of the environment in which the research was conducted, which often answers the “where” and “when” questions. Information may include details about the place and temperature; it may also include some temporal (or time-related) descriptors such as the time of the year. It should be noted that this step may overlap with some steps in Goal 2 (which describes the tools used or the experimental procedures conducted), but it remains distinct from them in that describing the setting specifically references the inherent characteristics of the context or environment in which the study took place, and not the characteristics of the materials used to accomplish the experiment or to affect some change in the subject that is being examined. You’ll read more about this in the next chapter.

• The mares were admitted at day 310 of pregnancy, housed in wide straw bedding boxes and fed with hay and concentrates twice a day. [9]
• All three studies were performed  in the eastern half of the SRS in the RCW management area  (US Department of Energy 2005). [10]

Methods Goal 1 Strategy: Introducing the Subjects/Participants

Introducing the subjects or participants in your study helps you to describe the characteristics of your sample. Whether you have human, animal, or inanimate participants or subjects, you will still need to provide the reader with a careful description of them. For a study involving humans, this answers the “who” question. For studies without humans, this often answers the “what” question. It should be noted, however, that not all disciplines have subjects/participants, but when subjects/participants can be identified, this step helps to describe subjects/participants and their original/pre-experimental characteristics, properties, origin, number, composition/construction, etc. The step also details the process by which subjects/participants were recruited/selected.

Below are a couple of examples excerpted from published reports of research with the relevant language in bold to illustrate how the words/phrases work to implement the strategy, which then works to accomplish the goal:

• Participants in this study included 10 TAs enrolled in this French doctoral program. [11]
• The Mexican populations, Chetumal and Tulum ( Mex-1 and Mex-2, respectively) , have large resin-producing glands, while the Venezuelan populations, Tovar and Caracas (Ven-1 and Ven-2, respectively) , have smaller glands. [12]

The Academic Phrasebank website provides a list of sentence starters that would indicate the use of this strategy. Here are a few examples:

Methods Goal 1 Strategy: Rationalizing Pre-Experiment Conditions

Rationalizing pre-experiment conditions  is a way to show the reader how you attained your specific sample or how you decided about the methods you chose prior to actually carrying out the experimental procedures of the study.

• The literature review presented above leads us to formulate our research questions more precisely. First, we ask whether there is a difference in well-being between the unemployed and those currently employed. [13]
• We defined two sub-samples of LAEs split at R = 25.5. The continuum-bright (UV-bright hereafter) sub-sample of 118 LAEs enables a direct comparison with the SED parameters of R less than 25.5 “BX,” star-forming galaxies in the same range of redshift (Steidel et al. 2004). The remaining 98 LAEs are classified as UV-faint. [14]

Keep in mind that the Methods section is very important. Even if readers are skimming a published article, they typically read the methods with careful attention to the details provided. Because Methods sections are often rote narratives of procedures, there are several frequently adopted words or phrases that are standard. The Academic Phrasebank website provides a list of these, which are summarized in the table below:

Overall, there is a lot of example language that you may use to incorporate as you write the Methods section. Using the goals and strategies as a guide, you can choose the words and phrases suggested to ensure that your methods are appropriately detailed and clear.

Key Takeaways

Goal #1 of writing the Methods section is related to Contextualizing the Study’s Methods. There are six possible strategies that you can use to accomplish this goal:

• Referencing previous works and/or
• Providing general information and/or
• Identifying the methodological approach and/or
• Describing the setting and/or
• Introducing the subjects/participants and/or

Remember: You do not need to include all of these strategies — they are simply possibilities for reaching the goal of Contextualizing the Study’s Methods.

• Ni, J. Q., Heber, A. J., Kelly, D. T., & Sutton, A. L. (1998). Mechanism of gas release from liquid swine wastes. In 2001 ASAE Annual Meeting (p. 1). American Society of Agricultural and Biological Engineers . ↵
• Morris, M. G., & Venkatesh, V. (2010). Job characteristics and job satisfaction: Understanding the role of enterprise resource planning system implementation. Mis Quarterly, 143-161. ↵
• Lin, P. C., & Yang, C. M. (2010). Impact of product pictures and brand names on memory of Chinese metaphorical advertisements. International Journal of Design, 4 (1). ↵
• Armstrong, L. M., Gu, S., & Luo, K. H. (2011). Effects of limestone calcination on the gasification processes in a BFB coal gasifier. Chemical Engineering Journal, 168 (2), 848-860. ↵
• Allais, S., Journaux, L., Levéziel, H., Payet-Duprat, N., Raynaud, P., Hocquette, J. F., ... & Renand, G. (2011). Effects of polymorphisms in the calpastatin and µ-calpain genes on meat tenderness in 3 French beef breeds. Journal of Animal Science, 89 (1), 1-11. ↵
• Guo, Z., Grebner, D., Sun, C., & Grado, S. (2010). Evaluation of Loblolly pine management regimes in Mississippi for biomass supplies: a simulation approach. Southern Journal of Applied Forestry, 34 (2), 65-71. ↵
• Mauromicale, G., Longo, A. M. G., & Monaco, A. L. (2011). The effect of organic supplementation of solarized soil on the quality of tomato fruit. Scientia Horticulturae, 129 (2), 189-196. ↵
• Clarke, P. J., Snowling, M. J., Truelove, E., & Hulme, C. (2010). Ameliorating children’s reading-comprehension difficulties: A randomized controlled trial. Psychological Science, 21( 8), 1106-1116. ↵
• Castagnetti, C., Mariella, J., Serrazanetti, G. P., Grandis, A., Merlo, B., Fabbri, M., & Mari, G. (2007). Evaluation of lung maturity by amniotic fluid analysis in equine neonate. Theriogenology, 67 (9), 1455-1462. ↵
• Goodrick, S. L., Shea, D., & Blake, J. (2010). Estimating fuel consumption for the upper coastal plain of South Carolina. Southern Journal of Applied Forestry, 34 (1), 5-12. ↵
• Mills, N. (2011). Teaching assistants’ self‐efficacy in teaching literature: Sources, personal assessments, and consequences. The Modern Language Journal, 95 (1), 61-80. ↵
• Pélabon, C., Carlson, M. L., Hansen, T. F., Yoccoz, N. G., & Armbruster, W. S. (2004). Consequences of inter‐population crosses on developmental stability and canalization of floral traits in Dalechampia scandens (Euphorbiaceae). Journal of Evolutionary Biology, 17 (1), 19-32. ↵
• Ervasti, H., & Venetoklis, T. (2010). Unemployment and subjective well-being: An empirical test of deprivation theory, incentive paradigm and financial strain approach. Acta Sociologica, 53 (2), 119-139. ↵
• Guaita, L., Acquaviva, V., Padilla, N., Gawiser, E., Bond, N. A., Ciardullo, R., ... & Schawinski, K. (2011). Lyα-emitting galaxies at z= 2.1: Stellar masses, dust, and star formation histories from spectral energy distribution fitting. The Astrophysical Journal, 733 (2), 114. ↵

Preparing to Publish Copyright © 2023 by Sarah Huffman; Elena Cotos; and Kimberly Becker is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

AP® US History

Ensuring your students earn the contextualization point on the dbq.

• The Albert Team
• Last Updated On: March 1, 2022

The redesign has brought a great deal of uncertainty and confusion amongst APUSH teachers.  In many ways, we are all “rookie” teachers, as all of us have the challenge of implementing fundamental curricular and skills-based changes into our classrooms.

One of the more significant changes is to the structure of one essay on the AP® exam, the Document Based question (DBQ).  The rubric for the DBQ was previously a more holistic essay that combined a strong thesis, and use of documents and outside information to support the argument.  This has been transformed into a much more structured and formulaic skills-based rubric.  The change has led to a healthy debate about the pros and cons of both types of essays, but in general the core of the essay has remained the same: write a thesis and support it with evidence in the form of documents and outside information.  If students continue to apply these basic writing skills, they are likely to earn 3 or 4 out of the seven total points for the Document Based Question .

In this post, we will explore one of these points students will be looking to earn to help their chances at passing the APUSH exam this May: the Contextualization point.

What is Contextualization?

According to the College Board, contextualization refers to a:

Historical thinking skill that involves the ability to connect historical events and processes to specific circumstances of time and place as well as broader regional, national, or global processes. ( College Board AP® Course and Exam Description, AP® US History, Fall 2015 )

Contextualization is a critical historical thinking skill that is featured in the newly redesigned course. In my opinion, this is a skill of fundamental importance for students to utilize in the classroom.  Often times, students find history difficult or boring because they don’t see connections between different historical time periods and the world they live in today.  They assume that events occur in a vacuum, and don’t realize that the historical context is critical in helping explain people’s beliefs and points of view in that period of time.  Putting events into context is something I always thought was important, but now that the College Board explicitly has established the skill, it has forced me to be more proactive in creating lessons and assignments that allow students to utilize this way of thinking.

The place that contextualization is most directly relevant on the actual AP® exam itself is the Document Based Question.  In order to earn the point for contextualization, students must:

Situate historical events, developments, or processes within the broader regional, national, or global context in which they occurred in order to draw conclusions about their relative significance. (College Board AP® Course and Exam Description, AP® US History, Fall 2015)

In other words, students are asked to provide background before jumping right into their thesis and essay and paint a picture of what is going on at the time of the prompt.  Although there is no specific requirement as to where contextualization should occur, it makes natural sense to place it in the introduction right before a thesis point.  Placing this historical background right at the beginning sets the stage for the argument that will occur in the body of the essay, and is consistent with expectations many English teachers have in how to write an introduction paragraph.

I explain contextualization to students by using the example of Star Wars.  Before the movie starts, the film begins with “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” and continues with background information on the characters, events, and other information that is crucial to understanding the film.  Without this context, the viewer would not know what is going on, and might miss key events or be lost throughout the film.  This is what contextualization aims to do in student essays.  It sets the stage for their thesis, evidence, and argument that is to follow.

Contextualization vs. Historical Context

One aspect of the DBQ rubric that can be a bit confusing initially is that students are asked to do this contextualization, but there is also another area which gives them the option to use historical context.  So what is the difference?

Contextualization refers to putting the entire essay into a broader context (preferably in the introduction).  However, when writing their essays, students are also required to analyze four of the documents that they utilize by either examining the author’s point of view, describing the intended audience of the source, identifying the author’s purpose or putting the source into historical context. The latter sounds similar to contextualization (and it is essentially the same skill), but historical context is only focused on the specific document being analyzed, not the entire essay, like the contextualization point.  For example, if a document is a map that shows slavery growing dramatically from 1820 to 1860, a student might point out that this growth can be explained in the context of the development of the cotton gin, which made the production of cotton much more profitable and let to the spread of slavery in the Deep South.  While essentially the same skill, historical context focuses on one specific document’s background.

Examples of Successful Student Contextualization Points

One of the biggest pitfalls that prevent students from earning the contextualization point is that they are too brief or vague.  In general, it would be difficult for students to earn the point if they are writing only a sentence or two.  Early in the year, I assigned students a DBQ based on the following prompt:

Evaluate the extent in which the Civil War was a turning point in the lives of African Americans in the United States.  Use the documents and your knowledge of the years 1860-1877 to construct your response.

This was the third DBQ we had written, and students were now getting brave enough to move beyond a thesis and document analysis and started attempting to tackle the contextualization point. However, the attempts were all over the map. One student wrote:

The Civil War was a bloody event that led to the death of thousands of Americans.

Of course this is a true statement, but is extremely vague.  What led to the Civil War?  Why was it so deadly?  Without any specific detail, this student could not earn the contextualization point.

Another student wrote:

Slavery had existed for hundreds of years in the United States.  It was a terrible thing that had to be abolished.

Again, this is a drive-by attempt at earning contextualization.  It mentions things that are true, but lacks any meaningful details or explanation that would demonstrate understanding of the time period in discussion.  What led to the beginning of slavery in the colonies?  How did it develop?  What made it so horrible?  How did individuals resist and protest slavery?  These are the types of details that would add meaning to contextualization.

One student nailed it.  She wrote:

The peculiar institution of slavery had been a part of America’s identity since the founding of the original English colony at Jamestown.  In the early years, compromise was key to avoiding the moral question, but as America entered the mid 19th century sectional tensions and crises with popular sovereignty, Kansas, and fugitive slaves made the issue increasingly unavoidable.  When the Civil War began, the war was transformed from one to simply save the Union to a battle for the future of slavery and freedom in the United States.

Now THAT is contextualization!  It gives specific details about the beginning of slavery and its development.  It discusses attempts at compromise, but increasing sectional tensions that led to the Civil War.  The writer paints a vivid and clear picture of the situation, events, and people that set the stage for the Civil War.  Students don’t want to write a 6-8 sentence paragraph (they will want to save time for their argument in the body), but they need to do more than write a vague sentence that superficially addresses the era.

Strategies for Teaching Contextualization to Students

Analyze Lots of Primary Sources One of the best ways to prepare for the DBQ is for students to practice reading and comprehending primary source texts, particularly texts that are written by people who use very different language and sentence structure from today.  This helps them understand and analyze documents, but it also can be helpful in practicing contextualization.  Looking at different perspectives and points of view in the actual historical time periods they are learning is key in allowing students to understand how the era can impact beliefs, values and events that occur.

Assign Many DBQ Assessments and Share Specific Examples The more often students write DBQs, the more comfortable students will get with the entire process and skill set involved, including contextualization.  One thing that has been especially successful in my classroom is to collect a handful of student attempts at the contextualization point and share them with students.  Students then get to examine them and look at effective and less effective attempts at earning contextualization.  Often the best way for students to learn what to do or how to improve is to see what their classmates have done.

Incorporating In-Class Activities The course is broken into nine distinct time periods from 1491 to present.  In each period or unit students are assigned activities that force them to put a specific policy, event, or movement into context.  For example, we did lecture notes on the presidency of JFK, learning about the Man on the Moon Speech, Cuban Missile Crisis, and creation of the Peace Corps.  Students had to write 3-4 sentences that asked them to put these events in historical context using the Cold War.  This allowed students to understand that each of these seemingly unrelated historical events were shaped by the tension between the United States and Soviet Union: winning the space race, stopping a communist nuclear threat less than 100 miles from Florida, and spreading goodwill into nations that might otherwise turn to communism all are strategies the United States used to thwart the Soviet threat.  By doing this activity, students gain an appreciation for how historical context shapes events and decisions of the day.

Teach Cause and Effect in United States History It is very easy to get caught up as a teacher in how to best get lots of minutia and factoids into students heads quickly and efficiently.  However, if we can teach history not as a series of independent and unrelated events, but as a series of events that have a causal relationship that impact what happens next, this helps students grasp and understand contextualization.  For example, in the lead-up to World War I, students create a timeline of events that led to America entering the conflict.  As students examine the torpedoing of the Lusitania, unrestricted submarine warfare, the Zimmermann telegram, etc., they gain an understanding that it was not a random decision by President Wilson, but rather a series of events that precipitated the declaration of war.  This is what contextualization is: the background that sets the stage for a particular moment in American history.

Examine Contextualization with Current Events I know what you are thinking, I have one school year (less if your school year starts in September) to get through 1491 to Present and now I am supposed to make this a current events class as well?  The answer is yes and no.  Will stuff from the news pages be content the students need to know for the exam: absolutely not.  However, it is a great opportunity for students to understand that our past explains why our country is what it is today.

For example, President Obama’s decision to work towards normalizing relations with Cuba makes more sense if students think about it through the lens of contextualization.  The United States invaded Cuba in 1898 in the Spanish-American War and set up a protectorate.  Cubans, upset with what they perceived as U.S. meddling and intervention led a communist revolution in 1959, ousting the American-backed government and setting the stage for one of the scariest moments in the Cold War : the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Looking at how the past shapes current events today helps students understand this skill, and it also helps them gain a deeper appreciation of how important history is in shaping the world around them.

Any time changes happen, there is a temptation to be reactionary and reject them.  I have found that by being more deliberate about helping students understand historical context, their engagement and understanding have improved significantly.  Teachers always are fighting that battle between covering the content (which is daunting in an AP® course) and helping students understand the “so what?” question.  Why does this matter to me?  By making connections, students can see that history does not every happen in a vacuum.  Our shared narrative is a series of events and ideas that continuously evolve and build off of each other.  When students gain a firm understanding of how the past impacts their lives today, it makes learning way more meaningful and fun.

Contextualization is tough for students at first, but it is a skill application that can be perfected and improved to maximize your students’ chances of earning that point and rocking the AP® exam.

Looking for AP® US History practice?

Kickstart your AP® US History prep with Albert. Start your AP® exam prep today .

We also go over five-steps to writing effective FRQs for AP® US History in this video:

Ben Hubing is an educator at Greendale High School in Greendale, Wisconsin.  Ben has taught AP® U.S. History and AP® U.S. Government and Politics for the last eight years and was a reader last year for the AP® U.S. History Short Answer.  Ben earned his Bachelors degree at The University of Wisconsin-Madison and Masters degree at Cardinal Stritch University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

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Contextualization & historicization: 2 academic must-haves

Two key ingredients of scholarly writing, found none too frequently in college essays, are contextualization and historicization. These techniques allow scholars to provide perspective on (and even self-evaluate) their claims and conclusions.

Ever wonder how scholars can write 20 or 30 pages (or a 400-page dissertation) on a topic that is so narrow and obscure that you feel you could squeeze out a paragraph, and even that would be an epic achievement?

If you read a scholarly paper, you’ll see that much of those many pages aren’t filled with specific details from the chosen topic, or even direct analysis of those details.

But don’t details and analysis make up the substance of any good academic essay, you ask? They do, but scholars feel there’s plenty else to do, too.

Scholars spend a lot of time “positioning” their argument, as they like to say, explaining why what they’re saying is important, and trying to see the bigger picture within that very obscure topic.

And to do that, they contextualize and historicize. To contextualize something means giving important perspective by citing similar examples or relevant background.

To historicize something is to explain the topic’s social environment in history and speculate how this environment may have shaped the topic.

Some techniques to consider using in your next scholarly paper:

• compare your primary topic of analysis to others like/unlike it (e.g., a film analysis of “Saw IV” could mention similarities and differences between contemporaneous horror films)
• expose how your social/economic/political background might shape how you look at the issue (e.g., growing up in a post 9/11 America, your analysis of Hugo Chavez’s governmental practices will likely differ greatly from a non-American born a generation earlier)
• explain briefly what historical circumstances led up to the topic you’re discussing (e.g., comic book creator of “Plastic Man,” Jack Cole, first started cartooning for Boy’s Life and the American Can Factory, which may have influence his style)
• explore how your analysis fits into a larger discussion about a field (e.g., what does your analysis of “The OC” contribute to how scholars should go about analyzing Orange County, California?)
• cite other scholars who have recently contributed to the field you’re working in (if you’re analyzing teen behavior in a film, cite a recent scholar in child psychology).

All of these things are contextualization and/or historicization, and they’re done by scholars all the time. Here’s how:

Contextualization

Look at this example from an essay that analyzes the development and trends of Disney films in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. In the below excerpt, scholar Peter Kramer stops analyzing the films themselves and instead explores their financial context:

What about the performance of Disney’s feature films (as distinct from its theme parks and merchandising)? Even Janet Wasko, Disney’s most knowledgeable analyst, describes the 1970s as a period of crisis for Disney’s feature film division.

--Peter Kramer, “The Best Disney Film Never Made: Children’s Films and the Family Audience in American Cinema since the 1960s” (2002)

While Kramer’s focus in this section about the 1970s is on Disney films like Robin Hood (1974) and The Apple Dumpling Gang (1975), he again pauses to mention non-Disney films and give the reader some perspective on Disney’s period of crisis:

With rentals of $10-20 million, Disney’s hits performed well below the blockbuster business of The Godfather (1972, 86.3 million), The Exorcist (1973, $82.2 million) and Jaws (1975, $121.3 million). Yet it is important to note that the studio consistently produced new hits.

The thing I want to draw your attention to is not just the historical research, snazzy statistics, or scholarly name-dropping, but the way those things connect to the point of the essay: Kramer follows the statement of earnings by films like The Godfather with “Yet it is important to note that [Disney] consistently produced new hits.” Kramer doesn’t provide history for history’s sake. He shows that the financial low-point of Disney films in the 70s didn’t seen to affect the studio’s popularity or creativity.

Historicization

This concept grew out of the feeling that many scholars analyzed texts and art in a vacuum, ignoring the important influences of historical situation. Instead of assuming that Shakespeare’s plays are full of universal, timeless themes, these new, historically-oriented scholars would say that Shakespeare was a product of his environment and would match themes in the plays to concerns and developments in Elizabethan England.

Take this example of historicization:

As Priscilla Wald recently reminded us, American Studies developed in the Cold War decades alongside other area studies, such as Middle East Studies or Eastern European Studies, and, like those, took upon itself the production of specialists with a broad knowledge of a particular region or nation’s language, culture, history, and political, judicial and economic systems.

– “Foreigners Within and Innocents Abroad: Discourse of the Self in the Internationalization of American Studies,” Milette Shamir (2004)

Here, Shamir is historicizing a few things. He mentions that Wald “recently reminded us,” pointing to the historical progression of scholarship on a subject. He then paraphrases Wald’s observation about how a field of academia, American Studies, formed during the Cold War. Part of Shamir’s point, that is, is to show that fundamental approaches of American Studies is shaped by the Cold War mentality it was born into.

This brings up another common facet of scholarly writing worth mentioning. Instead of just analyzing, say a given film or text, scholars always try to answer the question “how does my analysis of a given text teach us scholars more about our field?” On a paper that analyzes a film set in Orange County, California, for instance, a scholar would ask how the film expands our method for film studies or our way of analyzing place.

Historicization doesn’t just mean looking at the social environment of your topic, however. It also means exploring how your own background gives you, the scholar, biases and ways of thinking and looking at the world. So, another thing you’ll see scholars do is reveal their ideologies:

While I now find myself located in what some hundred and fifty years ago was called the northern frontier of Alta California, I spent the first half of my life and the mouth of the Rio Grande in South Texas. My quest for a new mapping of American Cultural Studies necessarily worries about the politics of location….The purpose of these brief personal remarks is not to demonstrate a Manichean clash of identities and affiliations, but rather to begin mapping out the phantasmatics of Nuestra America’s borders at our own complex fin de siglo .

–Jose David Saldivar’s “Nuestra America’s Borders: Remapping America’s Cultural Studies” (1997).

But you’ve been doing this all along, you argue. Well, maybe not revealing your own sociopolitical ideologies. But your essays include historical facts and other examples.

And in a sense, you’ve been historicizing and contextualizing your writing. This is nothing new, true. But by knowing what academics call it, why it’s done, and seeing examples of how academics integrate it into their scholarly writing, perhaps you’ll do it better in the future–and find better ways to fill up an 10-page scholarly assignment.

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Department of English

First-Year Writing

• Contextualizing
• WAT Curriculum
• Learning Objectives
• Collecting and Curating
• Circulating
• WAT Assignment Invention
• Course Development Tool
• Sample WAT Course Design
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When students contextualize, they are situating ideas, arguments, or practices in a larger context (e.g., a historical context, a critical context, a cultural context) in order to call their audience’s attention to that context. Contextualizing goes beyond summarizing the relevant information about an author or idea; when students contextualize, they use research in order to construct or bring into view a picture of the broad-scale situation, circumstance(s), or relationships that surround an issue, text, genre, or mode (as opposed to tracing a particular conversation within an issue, as in engaging a conversation).

Contextualizing Learning Objectives

Click here for PDF version of Contextualizing Learning Objectives.

Information Literacy Threshold Concepts

• Authority is constructed and contextual
• Information has value

Habits of Mind

• Persistence
• Flexibility
• Responsibility

Scholarly Bibliography

Devitt, Amy. “Teaching Critical Genre Awareness.” Genre in a Changing World , edited by Charles Bazerman, et al., The WAC Clearinghouse, 2009, pp. 337-351.

Beaufort, Anne. “Operationalizing the Concept of Discourse Community: A Case Study of One Institutional Site of Composing.” Research in the Teaching of English , vol. 31, no. 4, 1997, pp. 486–529.

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Chapter 9: Towards the Well-Researched Paper

Corroborate, Contrast, Contextualize

When you are searching for sources to help you support your argument, resist the impulse to look only for documents that pertain to your exact subject matter. Sometimes, students will be frustrated because they have searched exact terms, such as “Occupy Wall Street” AND “Facebook,” and have come up with nothing. However, remember that you are creating your own unique argument. Trying to find papers that have made exactly the same argument you want to make will nudge you towards the “patchwork” model and away from the opportunity to put together something new and interesting of your own.

Instead, look for papers on similar subjects or on the broader categories into which your specific discussion fits. Other writers interested in social media and its use in protest movements will have produced papers on the subject. Exploration of this material can be very profitable for you.

You may find material that corroborates yours. If Author A’s paper on some other protest movement’s use of social media has come to conclusions that seem to confirm your own (when you consider both papers in light of the broader subject), you might present some of Author A’s research and compare it closely to your own.

You may find material that contrasts with yours. This material is just as valuable as the corroborating material. Perhaps you can use it to explore the differences between the contexts of the two discussions (is Author B examining a different type of social media or a different variety of protest movement? Did the users approach the social media in a different way? Did the protest movement originate from a different social context or cultural background? Is Author B herself working from assumptions that are fundamentally different from yours, or does Author B’s paper genuinely offer a complication you will have to take into consideration as you revise and refine your thesis?).

You may find material that contextualizes yours. Perhaps Author C has written a paper on the history of protest movements, or on the way communities seem to work online, or on social upheaval and the Internet, or on Occupy Wall Street’s origins and modus operandi. All four of these subjects are relevant to your paper, but they are also broader in scope. It is often very helpful to look at secondary research on the categories to which your primary document belongs. You will, for instance, be able to discuss the Occupy Wall Street Facebook page more knowledgeably if you know something about Occupy Wall Street.

Corroboration, contrast, and contextualization will all give you ways of approaching your subject matter that would remain inaccessible to you if you limited yourself to a close reading. The secondary works you consult will provide factual information you would not otherwise have, as well as analytical ideas that come from perspectives that might not otherwise have occurred to you. You do need to be careful that you are engaging with these works instead of merely replicating them, but we’ll discuss this issue in more detail below.

Our three “c” terms are still rather broad. Let’s break them down a little and look at some more specific types of information you will find in your sources.

Write Here, Right Now: An Interactive Introduction to Academic Writing and Research Copyright © 2018 by Ryerson University is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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How to Contextualize an Idea So That It’s Well Received

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What do you do when audiences aren’t receptive to your speech? Why should you contextualize your ideas, and how should you do it?

It can be nerve-wracking standing in front of an audience that might not agree with your viewpoints. By contextualizing your main idea at the beginning of your presentation, you’ll have a better chance of winning them over to your side.

Keep reading to learn how to contextualize ideas, according to Amplify Your Influence by René Rodriguez.

The Art of Contextualizing

Rodriguez states that, before you present your main idea, you must know how to contextualize it. This ensures your audience views your main idea the way you want them to rather than through their personal contexts. We all typically view information through our personal context, which is based on our experiences, memories, and preconceptions, along with our present physical and emotional states. This context determines how receptive we are to new ideas, how likely we are to act on these ideas, and how we’ll react to them emotionally. 

(Shortform note: Some experts use the concept of personal contexts in disciplines beyond communication. For example, occupational therapists use it to define a range of considerations that might affect a client’s ability to participate in their occupation. Along with our life experiences, some factors that might make up our personal context include our age, race or ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, education, and cultural identity.)

Your audience might have aversions or fears about your main idea that form part of their personal context. This can hinder their ability to receive your ideas and thus, your ability to change their behavior. When people feel unsure and unsafe, their hypothalamus (the part of the brain responsible for automatic functions such as digestion and breathing) activates, shutting down their ability to process new information. 

(Shortform note: Some research supports Rodriguez’s assertion that the stress response we experience when feeling unsafe hinders our ability to absorb information. In addition to activating your hypothalamus, this state also affects the amygdala’s ability to send and receive input to and from the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain that consciously directs our decisions and actions based on reflective thought. This means that when we’re in this state, our brains can’t turn sensory input into memory. Additionally, we’re no longer in control of our behavioral responses.)

Instead of letting this restrict you as a speaker, guide audience members’ perception of your main idea by creating context at the beginning of your communication. Specifically, addressing your audience members’ fears and concerns primes them to be open and receptive. For example, contextualize your main idea using pathos by telling a story that helps your audience members empathize with you. 

(Shortform note: In The Pyramid Principle , Barbara Minto offers three steps for writing an introduction that contextualizes your main idea, as Rogriguez recommends. First, provide your audience with a familiar context—this helps them see that what you’ll be sharing is relevant to them, which will make them more receptive to your ideas. For instance, share a story (as Rogriguez proposes), but make sure it’s a story that’s relevant to their lives. (Introducing familiarity may also soothe any fears the audience has about your idea.) Then, pose a relevant question that will pique your audience member’s curiosity and make them want to keep listening. Finally, share your main idea as an answer to this question.)

Shortform Example: Contextualizing a Meditation Workshop

Say you’re facilitating a meditation workshop for a group of businesspeople. Your main idea is that meditation can be a valuable tool to manage work stress and create a healthy lifestyle, and your delivery of that idea includes a meditation exercise for the audience to participate in. 

You sent a survey out before the workshop, so you already know some of your audience’s personal contexts surrounding meditation: Many of them wrote that they’ve either never tried it, or they’ve tried it and found it difficult. These personal contexts indicate some aversion or trepidation about meditation. Therefore, if you were to begin the workshop with your meditation exercise, the audience members would likely get little out of it. Their hypothalami would shut down the learning part of their brains, and they’d be unable to absorb any benefits from the exercise.

However, say you begin by addressing their concerns instead, thus changing their context. You start the workshop with some information about what meditation is and isn’t: It’s primarily about paying attention to the present moment so that anyone can do it, with no experience required. It’s an ongoing practice, so it’s okay if they don’t notice immediate effects the first few times they do it. To tap into the audience’s pathos, you might tell a personal story about how it’s helped you. Finally, you state that everyone’s experience is different, and the most important thing is to tune into themselves and acknowledge any feelings and sensations that arise. 

By offering all of this context at the beginning of your presentation, you’ve covered the audience’s points of aversion toward the exercise. You’ve given them permission to experience whatever they experience and let go of their expectations. This will make them more receptive to your ideas and make it easier for you to change their behavior—meaning they’ll be more likely to try meditation again.

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Somehow, Katie was able to pull off her childhood dream of creating a career around books after graduating with a degree in English and a concentration in Creative Writing. Her preferred genre of books has changed drastically over the years, from fantasy/dystopian young-adult to moving novels and non-fiction books on the human experience. Katie especially enjoys reading and writing about all things television, good and bad.

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• Knowledge Base
• Starting the research process
• How to Write a Problem Statement | Guide & Examples

How to Write a Problem Statement | Guide & Examples

Published on November 6, 2022 by Shona McCombes and Tegan George. Revised on November 20, 2023.

A problem statement is a concise and concrete summary of the research problem you seek to address. It should:

• Contextualize the problem. What do we already know?
• Describe the exact issue your research will address. What do we still need to know?
• Show the relevance of the problem. Why do we need to know more about this?
• Set the objectives of the research. What will you do to find out more?

Table of contents

When should you write a problem statement, step 1: contextualize the problem, step 2: show why it matters, step 3: set your aims and objectives.

Problem statement example

Other interesting articles

Frequently asked questions about problem statements.

There are various situations in which you might have to write a problem statement.

In the business world, writing a problem statement is often the first step in kicking off an improvement project. In this case, the problem statement is usually a stand-alone document.

In academic research, writing a problem statement can help you contextualize and understand the significance of your research problem. It is often several paragraphs long, and serves as the basis for your research proposal . Alternatively, it can be condensed into just a few sentences in your introduction .

A problem statement looks different depending on whether you’re dealing with a practical, real-world problem or a theoretical issue. Regardless, all problem statements follow a similar process.

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The problem statement should frame your research problem, giving some background on what is already known.

Practical research problems

For practical research, focus on the concrete details of the situation:

• Where and when does the problem arise?
• Who does the problem affect?
• What attempts have been made to solve the problem?

Theoretical research problems

For theoretical research, think about the scientific, social, geographical and/or historical background:

• What is already known about the problem?
• Is the problem limited to a certain time period or geographical area?
• How has the problem been defined and debated in the scholarly literature?

The problem statement should also address the relevance of the research. Why is it important that the problem is addressed?

Don’t worry, this doesn’t mean you have to do something groundbreaking or world-changing. It’s more important that the problem is researchable, feasible, and clearly addresses a relevant issue in your field.

Practical research is directly relevant to a specific problem that affects an organization, institution, social group, or society more broadly. To make it clear why your research problem matters, you can ask yourself:

• What will happen if the problem is not solved?
• Who will feel the consequences?
• Does the problem have wider relevance? Are similar issues found in other contexts?

Sometimes theoretical issues have clear practical consequences, but sometimes their relevance is less immediately obvious. To identify why the problem matters, ask:

• How will resolving the problem advance understanding of the topic?
• What benefits will it have for future research?
• Does the problem have direct or indirect consequences for society?

Finally, the problem statement should frame how you intend to address the problem. Your goal here should not be to find a conclusive solution, but rather to propose more effective approaches to tackling or understanding it.

The research aim is the overall purpose of your research. It is generally written in the infinitive form:

• The aim of this study is to determine …
• This project aims to explore …
• This research aims to investigate …

The research objectives are the concrete steps you will take to achieve the aim:

• Qualitative methods will be used to identify …
• This work will use surveys to collect …
• Using statistical analysis, the research will measure …

The aims and objectives should lead directly to your research questions.

Learn how to formulate research questions

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See an example

You can use these steps to write your own problem statement, like the example below.

Step 1: Contextualize the problem A family-owned shoe manufacturer has been in business in New England for several generations, employing thousands of local workers in a variety of roles, from assembly to supply-chain to customer service and retail. Employee tenure in the past always had an upward trend, with the average employee staying at the company for 10+ years. However, in the past decade, the trend has reversed, with some employees lasting only a few months, and others leaving abruptly after many years.

Step 2: Show why it matters As the perceived loyalty of their employees has long been a source of pride for the company, they employed an outside consultant firm to see why there was so much turnover. The firm focused on the new hires, concluding that a rival shoe company located in the next town offered higher hourly wages and better “perks”, such as pizza parties. They claimed this was what was leading employees to switch. However, to gain a fuller understanding of why the turnover persists even after the consultant study, in-depth qualitative research focused on long-term employees is also needed. Focusing on why established workers leave can help develop a more telling reason why turnover is so high, rather than just due to salaries. It can also potentially identify points of change or conflict in the company’s culture that may cause workers to leave.

Step 3: Set your aims and objectives This project aims to better understand why established workers choose to leave the company. Qualitative methods such as surveys and interviews will be conducted comparing the views of those who have worked 10+ years at the company and chose to stay, compared with those who chose to leave.

If you want to know more about the research process , methodology , research bias , or statistics , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

Methodology

• Sampling methods
• Simple random sampling
• Stratified sampling
• Cluster sampling
• Likert scales
• Reproducibility

 Statistics

• Null hypothesis
• Statistical power
• Probability distribution
• Effect size
• Poisson distribution

Research bias

• Optimism bias
• Cognitive bias
• Implicit bias
• Hawthorne effect
• Anchoring bias
• Explicit bias

Once you’ve decided on your research objectives , you need to explain them in your paper, at the end of your problem statement .

Keep your research objectives clear and concise, and use appropriate verbs to accurately convey the work that you will carry out for each one.

I will compare …

All research questions should be:

• Focused on a single problem or issue
• Researchable using primary and/or secondary sources
• Feasible to answer within the timeframe and practical constraints
• Specific enough to answer thoroughly
• Complex enough to develop the answer over the space of a paper or thesis
• Relevant to your field of study and/or society more broadly

Research objectives describe what you intend your research project to accomplish.

They summarize the approach and purpose of the project and help to focus your research.

Your objectives should appear in the introduction of your research paper , at the end of your problem statement .

Your research objectives indicate how you’ll try to address your research problem and should be specific:

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Q: How to write the contextual perspective in a research proposal?

Please let me know how to write the contextual perspective in a proposal.

Asked by NAKIRIJJA GRACE on 23 Oct, 2018

Contextual perspective is an essential aspect of a research proposal and requires critical attention while writing the proposal. In the Introduction section of the proposal, the writer should try to create interest in the readers about the proposed research. For this purpose, the author needs to provide a broad background for the topic of the study and place the study within the large context of the scholarly research.

Here are a few simple steps that will help you frame the contextual perspective of your research:

1. Briefly describe the field you will be researching

2. Explain why this field is important

3. State what are the currently trending topics of interest or "hot topics" in this field

4. Describe the specific area within the field that you will be researching

5. Explain how your proposed research will add to the field

6. Summarize the existing research base in the field and identify the gaps that your study proposes to address

Make sure to include relevant references and citations.  If presented adequately, the contextual perspective effectively establishes not only the need for the proposed research but also indicates the expertise of the writer in that specific research area. The theoretical framework behind the study question should also be discussed early in the Introduction or the literature review section as a part of the contextual perspective.

Suggested reading:  

• How should I write a research proposal?
• How to write a statement of problem for your research proposal
• What is the best way of stating the background of a study?
• How can I make the background of my study engaging?
• 10 Tips to write an effective research grant proposal

Answered by Editage Insights on 30 Oct, 2018

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Series: Practical guidance to qualitative research. Part 2: Context, research questions and designs

Irene korstjens.

a Faculty of Health Care, Research Centre for Midwifery Science, Zuyd University of Applied Sciences, Maastricht, The Netherlands;

Albine Moser

b Faculty of Health Care, Research Centre Autonomy and Participation of Chronically Ill People, Zuyd University of Applied Sciences, Heerlen, The Netherlands;

c Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences, Department of Family Medicine, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands

In the course of our supervisory work over the years, we have noticed that qualitative research tends to evoke a lot of questions and worries, so-called frequently asked questions (FAQs). This series of four articles intends to provide novice researchers with practical guidance for conducting high-quality qualitative research in primary care. By ‘novice’ we mean Master’s students and junior researchers, as well as experienced quantitative researchers who are engaging in qualitative research for the first time. This series addresses their questions and provides researchers, readers, reviewers and editors with references to criteria and tools for judging the quality of qualitative research papers. This second article addresses FAQs about context, research questions and designs. Qualitative research takes into account the natural contexts in which individuals or groups function to provide an in-depth understanding of real-world problems. The research questions are generally broad and open to unexpected findings. The choice of a qualitative design primarily depends on the nature of the research problem, the research question(s) and the scientific knowledge one seeks. Ethnography, phenomenology and grounded theory are considered to represent the ‘big three’ qualitative approaches. Theory guides the researcher through the research process by providing a ‘lens’ to look at the phenomenon under study. Since qualitative researchers and the participants of their studies interact in a social process, researchers influence the research process. The first article described the key features of qualitative research, the third article will focus on sampling, data collection and analysis, while the last article focuses on trustworthiness and publishing.

Key points on context, research questions and designs

• Research questions are generally, broad and open to unexpected findings, and depending on the research process might change to some extent.
• The SPIDER tool is more suited than PICO for searching for qualitative studies in the literature, and can support the process of formulating research questions for original studies.
• The choice of a qualitative design primarily depends on the nature of the research problem, the research question, and the scientific knowledge one seeks.
• Theory guides the researcher through the research process by providing a ‘lens’ to look at the phenomenon under study.
• Since qualitative researchers and the participants interact in a social process, the researcher influences the research process.

Introduction

In an introductory paper [ 1 ], we have described the key features of qualitative research. The current article addresses frequently asked questions about context, research questions and design of qualitative research.

Why is context important?

Qualitative research takes into account the natural contexts in which individuals or groups function, as its aim is to provide an in-depth understanding of real-world problems [ 2 ]. In contrast to quantitative research, generalizability is not a guiding principle. According to most qualitative researchers, the ‘reality’ we perceive is constructed by our social, cultural, historical and individual contexts. Therefore, you look for variety in people to describe, explore or explain phenomena in real-world contexts. Influence from the researcher on the context is inevitable. However, by striving to minimalize your interfering with people’s natural settings, you can get a ‘behind the scenes’ picture of how people feel or what other forces are at work, which may not be discovered in a quantitative investigation. Understanding what practitioners and patients think, feel or do in their natural context, can make clinical practice and evidence-based interventions more effective, efficient, equitable and humane. For example, despite their awareness of widespread family violence, general practitioners (GPs) seem to be hesitant to ask about intimate partner violence. By applying a qualitative research approach, you might explore how and why practitioners act this way. You need to understand their context to be able to interact effectively with them, to analyse the data, and report your findings. You might consider the characteristics of practitioners and patients, such as their age, marital status, education, health condition, physical environment or social circumstances, and how and where you conduct your observations, interviews and group discussions. By giving your readers a ‘thick description’ of the participants’ contexts you render their behaviour, experiences, perceptions and feelings meaningful. Moreover, you enable your readers to consider whether and how the findings of your study can be transferred to their contexts.

Research questions

Why should the research question be broad and open.

To enable a thorough in-depth description, exploration or explanation of the phenomenon under study, in general, research questions need to be broad and open to unexpected findings. Within more in-depth research, for example, during building theory in a grounded theory design, the research question might be more focused. Where quantitative research asks: ‘how many, how much, and how often?’ qualitative research would ask: ‘what?’ and even more ‘how, and why?’ Depending on the research process, you might feel a need for fine-tuning or additional questions. This is common in qualitative research as it works with ‘emerging design,’ which means that it is not possible to plan the research in detail at the start, as the researchers have to be responsive to what they find as the research proceeds. This flexibility within the design is seen as a strength in qualitative research but only within an overall coherent methodology.

What kind of literature would I search for when preparing a qualitative study?

You would search for literature that can provide you with insights into the current state of knowledge and the knowledge gap that your study might address ( Box 1 ). You might look for original quantitative, mixed-method and qualitative studies, or reviews such as quantitative meta-analyses or qualitative meta-syntheses. These findings would give you a picture of the empirical knowledge gap and the qualitative research questions that might lead to relevant and new insights and useful theories, models or concepts for studying your topic. When little knowledge is available, a qualitative study can be a useful starting point for subsequent studies. If in preparing your qualitative study, you cannot find sufficient literature about your topic, you might turn to proxy literature to explore the landscape around your topic. For example, when you are one of the very first researchers to study shared decision-making or health literacy in maternity care for disadvantaged parents-to-be, you might search for existing literature on these topics in other healthcare settings, such as general practice.

Searching the literature for qualitative studies: the SPIDER tool. Based on Cooke et al. [ 3 ].

Why do qualitative researchers prefer SPIDER to PICO?

The SPIDER tool (sample-phenomenon of interest-design-evaluation-research type) ( Box 1 ) is one of the available tools for qualitative literature searches [ 3 ]. It has been specifically developed for qualitative evidence synthesis, making it more suitable than PICO (population-intervention-comparison-outcome) in searching for qualitative studies that focus on understanding real-life experiences and processes of a variety of participants. PICO is primarily a tool for collecting evidence from published quantitative research on prognoses, diagnoses and therapies. Quantitative studies mostly use larger samples, comparing intervention and control groups, focusing on quantification of predefined outcomes at group level that can be generalized to larger populations. In contrast, qualitative research studies smaller samples in greater depth; it strives to minimalize manipulating their natural settings and is open to rich and unexpected findings. To suit this approach, the SPIDER tool was developed by adapting the PICO tool. Although these tools are meant for searching the literature, they can also be helpful in formulating research questions for original studies. Using SPIDER might support you in formulating a broad and open qualitative research question.

An example of an SPIDER-type question for a qualitative study using interviews is: ‘What are young parents’ experiences of attending antenatal education?’ The abstract and introduction of a manuscript might contain this broad and open research question, after which the methods section provides further operationalization of the elements of the SPIDER tool, such as (S) young mothers and fathers, aged 17–27 years, 1–12 months after childbirth, low to high educational levels, in urban or semi-urban regions; (PI) experiences of antenatal education in group sessions during pregnancy guided by maternity care professionals; (D) phenomenology, interviews; (E) perceived benefits and costs, psychosocial and peer support received, changes in attitude, expectations, and perceived skills regarding healthy lifestyle, childbirth, parenthood, etc.; and (R) qualitative.

Is it normal that my research question seems to change during the study?

During the research process, the research question might change to a certain degree because data collection and analysis sharpens the researcher’s lenses. Data collection and analysis are iterative processes that happen simultaneously as the research progresses. This might lead to a somewhat different focus of your research question and to additional questions. However, you cannot radically change your research question because that would mean you were performing a different study. In the methods section, you need to describe how and explain why the original research question was changed.

For example, let us return to the problem that GPs are hesitant to ask about intimate partner violence despite their awareness of family violence. To design a qualitative study, you might use SPIDER to support you in formulating your research question. You purposefully sample GPs, varying in age, gender, years of experience and type of practice (S-1). You might also decide to sample patients, in a variety of life situations, who have been faced with the problem (S-2). You clarify the phenomenon of family violence, which might be broadly defined when you design your study—e.g. family abuse and violence (PI-1). However, as your study evolves you might feel the need for fine-tuning—e.g. asking about intimate partner violence (PI-2). You describe the design, for instance, a phenomenological study using interviews (D), as well as the ‘think, feel or do’ elements you want to evaluate in your qualitative research. Depending on what is already known and the aim of your research, you might choose to describe actual behaviour and experiences (E-1) or explore attitudes and perspectives (E-2). Then, as your study progresses, you also might want to explain communication and follow-up processes (E-3) in your qualitative research (R).

Each of your choices will be a trade-off between the intended variety, depth and richness of your findings and the required samples, methods, techniques and efforts for data collection and analyses. These choices lead to different research questions, for example:

• ‘What are GPs’ and patients’ attitudes and perspectives towards discussing family abuse and violence?’ Or:
• ‘How do GPs behave during the communication and follow-up process when a patient’s signals suggest intimate partner violence?’

Designing qualitative studies

How do i choose a qualitative design.

As in quantitative research, you base the choice of a qualitative design primarily on the nature of the research problem, the research question and the scientific knowledge you seek. Therefore, instead of simply choosing what seems easy or interesting, it is wiser to first consider and discuss with other qualitative researchers the pros and cons of different designs for your study. Then, depending on your skills and your knowledge and understanding of qualitative methodology and your research topic, you might seek training or support from other qualitative researchers. Finally, just as in quantitative research, the resources and time available and your access to the study settings and participants also influence the choices you make in designing the study.

What are the most important qualitative designs?

Ethnography [ 4 ], phenomenology [ 5 ], and grounded theory [ 6 ] are considered the ‘big three’ qualitative approaches [ 7 ] ( Box 2 ). Box 2 shows that they stem from different theoretical disciplines and are used in various domains focusing on different areas of inquiry. Furthermore, qualitative research has a rich tradition of various designs [ 2 ]. Box 3 presents other qualitative approaches such as case studies [ 8 ], conversation analysis [ 9 ], narrative research [ 10 ], hermeneutic research [ 11 ], historical research [ 12 ], participatory action research and [ 13 ], participatory community research [ 14 ], and research based on critical social theory [ 15 ], for example, feminist research or empowerment evaluation [ 16 ]. Some researchers do not mention a specific qualitative approach or research tradition but use a descriptive generic research [ 17 ] or say that they used thematic analysis or content analysis, an analysis of themes and patterns that emerge in the narrative content from a qualitative study [ 2 ]. This form of data analysis will be addressed in Part 3 of our series.

The ‘big three’ approaches in qualitative study design. Based on Polit and Beck [ 2 ].

Definitions of other qualitative research approaches. Based on Polit and Beck [ 2 ].

Depending on your research question, you might choose one of the ‘big three’ designs

Let us assume that you want to study the caring relationship in palliative care in a primary care setting for people with COPD. If you are interested in the care provided by family caregivers from different ethnic backgrounds, you will want to investigate their experiences. Your research question might be ‘What constitutes the caring relationship between GPs and family caregivers in the palliative care for people with COPD among family caregivers of Moroccan, Syrian, and Iranian ethnicity?’ Since you are interested in the caring relationship within cultural groups or subgroups, you might choose ethnography. Ethnography is the study of culture within a society, focusing on one or more groups. Data is collected mostly through observations, informal (ethnographic) conversations, interviews and/or artefacts. The findings are presented in a lengthy monograph where concepts and patterns are presented in a holistic way using context-rich description.

If you are interested in the experiential world or ‘life-world’ of the family caregivers and the impact of caregiving on their own lives, your research question might be ‘What is the lived experience of being a family caregiver for a family member with COPD whose end is near?’ In such a case, you might choose phenomenology, in which data are collected through in-depth interviews. The findings are presented in detailed descriptions of participants’ experiences, grouped in themes.

If you want to study the interaction between GPs and family caregivers to generate a theory of ‘trust’ within caring relationships, your research question might be ‘How does a relationship of trust between GPs and family caregivers evolve in end-of-life care for people with COPD?’ Grounded theory might then be the design of the first choice. In this approach, data are collected mostly through in-depth interviews, but may also include observations of encounters, followed by interviews with those who were observed. The findings presented consist of a theory, including a basic social process and relevant concepts and categories.

If you merely aim to give a qualitative description of the views of family caregivers about facilitators and barriers to contacting GPs, you might use content analysis and present the themes and subthemes you found.

What is the role of theory in qualitative research?

The role of theory is to guide you through the research process. Theory supports formulating the research question, guides data collection and analysis, and offers possible explanations of underlying causes of or influences on phenomena. From the start of your research, theory provides you with a ‘lens’ to look at the phenomenon under study. During your study, this ‘theoretical lens’ helps to focus your attention on specific aspects of the data and provides you with a conceptual model or framework for analysing them. It supports you in moving beyond the individual ‘stories’ of the participants. This leads to a broader understanding of the phenomenon of study and a wider applicability and transferability of the findings, which might help you formulate new theory, or advance a model or framework. Note that research does not need to be always theory-based, for example, in a descriptive study, interviewing people about perceived facilitators and barriers for adopting new behaviour.

What is my role as a researcher?

As a qualitative researcher, you influence the research process. Qualitative researchers and the study participants always interact in a social process. You build a relationship midst data collection, for the short-term in an interview, or for the long-term during observations or longitudinal studies. This influences the research process and its findings, which is why your report needs to be transparent about your perspective and explicitly acknowledge your subjectivity. Your role as a qualitative researcher requires empathy as well as distance. By empathy, we mean that you can put yourself into the participants’ situation. Empathy is needed to establish a trusting relationship but might also bring about emotional distress. By distance, we mean that you need to be aware of your values, which influence your data collection, and that you have to be non-judgemental and non-directive.

There is always a power difference between the researcher and participants. Especially, feminist researchers acknowledge that the research is done by, for, and about women and the focus is on gender domination and discrimination. As a feminist researcher, you would try to establish a trustworthy and non-exploitative relationship and place yourself within the study to avoid objectification. Feminist research is transformative to change oppressive structures for women [ 16 ].

What ethical issues do I need to consider?

Although qualitative researchers do not aim to intervene, their interaction with participants requires careful adherence to the statement of ethical principles for medical research involving human subjects as laid down in the Declaration of Helsinki [ 18 ]. It states that healthcare professionals involved in medical research are obliged to protect the life, health, dignity, integrity, right to self-determination, privacy and confidentiality of personal information of research subjects. The Declaration also warrants that all vulnerable groups and individuals should receive specifically considered protection. This is also relevant when working in contexts of low-income countries and poverty. Furthermore, researchers must consider the ethical, legal and regulatory norms and standards in their own countries, as well as applicable international norms and standards. You might contact your local Medical Ethics Committee before setting up your study. In some countries, Medical Ethics Committees do not review qualitative research [ 2 ]. In that case, you will have to adhere to the Declaration of Helsinki [ 18 ], and you might seek approval from a research committee at your institution or the board of your institution.

In qualitative research, you have to ensure anonymity by code numbering the tapes and transcripts and removing any identifying information from the transcripts. When you work with transcription offices, they will need to sign a confidentiality agreement. Even though the quotes from participants in your manuscripts are anonymized, you cannot always guarantee full confidentiality. Therefore, you might ask participants special permission for using these quotes in scientific publications.

The next article in this Series on qualitative research, Part 3, will focus on sampling, data collection, and analysis [ 19 ]. In the final article, Part 4, we address two overarching themes: trustworthiness and publishing [ 20 ].

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the following junior researchers who have been participating for the last few years in the so-called ‘Think tank on qualitative research’ project, a collaborative project between Zuyd University of Applied Sciences and Maastricht University, for their pertinent questions: Erica Baarends, Jerome van Dongen, Jolanda Friesen-Storms, Steffy Lenzen, Ankie Hoefnagels, Barbara Piskur, Claudia van Putten-Gamel, Wilma Savelberg, Steffy Stans, and Anita Stevens. The authors are grateful to Isabel van Helmond, Joyce Molenaar and Darcy Ummels for proofreading our manuscripts and providing valuable feedback from the ‘novice perspective’.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

Thesis Statements

Formulating a thesis.

You need a good thesis statement for your essay but are having trouble getting started. You may have heard that your thesis needs to be specific and arguable, but still wonder what this really means.

Let’s look at some examples. Imagine you’re writing about John Hughes’s film Sixteen Candles (1984).

You take a first pass at writing a thesis:

Sixteen Candles is a romantic comedy about high school cliques.

Is this a strong thesis statement? Not yet, but it’s a good start. You’ve focused on a topic–high school cliques–which is a smart move because you’ve settled on one of many possible angles. But the claim is weak because it’s not yet arguable. Intelligent people would generally agree with this statement—so there’s no real “news” for your reader.  You want your thesis to say something surprising and debatable.   If your thesis doesn’t go beyond summarizing your source, it’s descriptive and not yet argumentative.

The key words in the thesis statement are “romantic comedy” and “high school cliques.” One way to sharpen the claim is to start asking questions .

For example, how does the film represent high school cliques in a surprising or complex way?  How does the film reinforce stereotypes about high school groups and how does it undermine them? Or why does the film challenge our expectations about romantic comedies by focusing on high school cliques? If you can answer one of those questions (or others of your own), you’ll have a strong thesis.

Take 2. You revise the thesis. Is it strong now?

Sixteen Candles is a romantic comedy criticizing the divisiveness created by high school cliques.

You’re getting closer. You’re starting to take a stance by arguing that the film identifies “divisiveness” as a problem and criticizes it, but your readers will want to know how this plays out and why it’s important. Right now, the thesis still sounds bland – not risky enough to be genuinely contentious.

Tip : Keep raising questions that test your ideas. And ask yourself the “so what” question. Why is your thesis interesting or important?

Take 3. Let’s try again. How about this version?

Although the film Sixteen Candles appears to reinforce stereotypes about high school cliques, it undermines them in important ways, questioning its viewers’ assumptions about what’s normal.

Bingo! This thesis statement is pretty strong. It challenges an obvious interpretation of the movie (that is just reinforces stereotypes), offering a new and more complex reading in its place. We also have a sense of why this argument is important. The film’s larger goal, we learn, is to question what we think we understand about normalcy.

What’s a Strong Thesis?

As we’ve just seen, a strong thesis statement crystallizes your paper’s argument and, most importantly, it’s arguable .

This means two things. It goes beyond merely summarizing or describing to stake out an interpretation or position that’s not obvious, and others could challenge for good reasons. It’s also arguable in the literal sense that it can be argued , or supported through a thoughtful analysis of your sources. If your argument lacks evidence, readers will think your thesis statement is an opinion or belief as opposed to an argument.

Exercises for Drafting an Arguable Thesis

A good thesis will be focused on your object of study (as opposed to making a big claim about the world) and will introduce the key words guiding your analysis. To get started, you might experiment with some of these “mad libs.” They’re thinking exercises that will help propel you toward an arguable thesis.

By examining __________________ [topic/approach], we can see _____________________[thesis—the claim that’s surprising], which is important because ___________________________.[1]

“By examining Sixteen Candles through the lens of Georg Simmel’s writings on fashion, we can seethat the protagonist’s interest in fashion as an expression of her conflicted desire to be seen as both unique and accepted by the group. This is important because the film offers its viewers a glimpse into the ambivalent yearnings of middle class youth in the 1980s.

Although viewers might assume the romantic comedy Sixteen Candles is merely entertaining, I believe its message is political. The film uses the romance between Samantha, a middle class sophomore, and Jake, an affluent senior, to reinforce the fantasy that anyone can become wealthy and successful with enough cunning and persistence.

Still Having Trouble? Let’s Back Up…

It helps to understand why readers value the arguable thesis. What larger purpose does it serve? Your readers will bring a set of expectations to your essay. The better you can anticipate the expectations of your readers, the better you’ll be able to persuade them to entertain seeing things your way.

Academic readers (and readers more generally) read to learn something new. They want to see the writer challenge commonplaces—either everyday assumptions about your object of study or truisms in the scholarly literature. In other words, academic readers want to be surprised so that their thinking shifts or at least becomes more complex by the time they finish reading your essay. Good essays problematize what we think we know and offer an alternative explanation in its place. They leave their reader with a fresh perspective on a problem.

We all bring important past experiences and beliefs to our interpretations of texts, objects, and problems. You can harness these observational powers to engage critically with what you are studying. The key is to be alert to what strikes you as strange, problematic, paradoxical, or puzzling about your object of study. If you can articulate this and a claim in response, you’re well on your way to formulating an arguable thesis in your introduction.

How do I set up a “problem” and an arguable thesis in response?

All good writing has a purpose or motive for existing. Your thesis is your surprising response to this problem or motive. This is why it seldom makes sense to start a writing project by articulating the thesis. The first step is to articulate the question or problem your paper addresses.

Here are some possible ways to introduce a conceptual problem in your paper’s introduction.

1. Challenge a commonplace interpretation (or your own first impressions).

How are readers likely to interpret this source or issue? What might intelligent readers think at first glance? (Or, if you’ve been given secondary sources or have been asked to conduct research to locate secondary sources, what do other writers or scholars assume is true or important about your primary source or issue?)

What does this commonplace interpretation leave out, overlook, or under-emphasize?

2. Help your reader see the complexity of your topic.

Identify and describe for your reader a paradox, puzzle, or contradiction in your primary source(s).

What larger questions does this paradox or contradiction raise for you and your readers?

3. If your assignment asks you to do research, piggyback off another scholar’s research.

Summarize for your reader another scholar’s argument about your topic, primary source, or case study and tell your reader why this claim is interesting.

Now explain how you will extend this scholar’s argument to explore an issue or case study that the scholar doesn’t address fully.

4. If your assignment asks you to do research, identify a gap in another scholar’s or a group of scholars’ research.

Summarize for your reader another scholar’s argument about your topic, primary source, or case study and tell your reader why this claim is interesting. Or, summarize how scholars in the field tend to approach your topic.

Next, explain what important aspect this scholarly representation misses or distorts. Introduce your particular approach to your topic and its value

5. If your assignment asks you to do research, bring in a new lens for investigating your case study or problem.

Summarize for your reader how a scholar or group of scholars has approached your topic.

Introduce a theoretical source (possibly from another discipline) and explain how it helps you address this issue from a new and productive angle.

Testing Your Thesis

You can test your thesis statement’s arguability by asking the following questions:

If so, try some of the exercises above to articulate your paper’s conceptual problem or question.

If not, return to your sources and practice the exercises above.

If it’s about the world, revise it so that it focuses on your primary source or case study. Remember you need solid evidence to support your thesis.

“Formulating a Thesis” was written by Andrea Scott, Princeton University

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank my current and former colleagues in the Princeton Writing Program for helping me think through and test ways of teaching the arguable thesis. Special thanks go to Kerry Walk, Amanda Irwin Wilkins, Judy Swan, and Keith Shaw. A shout-out to Mark Gaipa as well, whose cartoons on teaching source use remain a program favorite.

[1] Adapted from Erik Simpson’s “Five Ways of Looking at a Thesis” at http://www.math.grinnell.edu/~simpsone/Teaching/fiveways.html

• Formulating a Thesis. Authored by : Andrea Scott. Provided by : Princeton University. Located at : http://www.princeton.edu/main/ . Project : WritingCommons. License : CC BY-NC-ND: Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives

A Literature Research Guide: Contextualize

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Contextualize

Information about an author's life and times, the society they worked in, and the sources they drew on in their work can all help provide context for understanding and writing about literature.  Please select the options under the Contextualize tab above for resources concerning an author's life, literary history, and historical context.

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Formalist Stylistics adheres strictly to a text. This stance is inspired by the theory of textualism , which emerged in the second half of the 1970s and was in the spotlight in the 1980s . Textualism maintains that the interpretation of a text is primarily based on its ordinary meaning, without taking into account any external influence. It examines a text as a self-contained object—merely identifying its features without attempting to relate them to the message. Precisely, it ignores the role of context in the analysis. It reduces the importance of a text’s pragmatic, social, and situational contexts. Within the text, the focus is restricted to formal linguistic features, including phonology, lexicology, syntax , and a few literary devices which characterize imaginative writing. It does not deal with the thematic concerns and artistic significance of a text. In sum, it is a stylistic approach in which only the text is in the limelight. In contrast to this theory, Cognitive Stylistics assigns primacy to contextualization and non-textual sources such as world knowledge.

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Contextualism in Epistemology

Geoffrey Pynn, Northern Illinois University

• Published: 05 October 2016
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In epistemology, contextualism is the view that the truth-conditions of knowledge claims vary with the contexts in which those claims are made. This article surveys the main arguments for contextualism, describes a variety of different approaches to developing the view, and discusses how contextualism has been used to treat the problem of radical skepticism. Many different objections to contextualism have appeared since the view first achieved prominence. This article explores and responds to a range of objections to contextualism, focusing particularly those arising from aspects of the linguistic behavior of the word “know” and its cognates. Finally, several alternatives to contextualism are described, including: traditional invariantism, contextualism’s original opponent; subject-sensitive invariantism, which emerged as a way of accommodating the primary data that motivates contextualism within an invariantist framework; and relativism, a new competitor according to which the truth-conditions of knowledge claims vary not with the context in which they are made, but the context in which they are assessed.

1. Introduction

A knowledge attribution is a claim that someone knows that something is the case. What conditions must be met in order for a knowledge attribution to be true? Over and above true belief, knowledge involves various “epistemic” factors, such as justification, warrant, reliability, and so on. We can refer generically to such factors by saying that knowing involves being in a good epistemic position . But how good is good enough? How good an epistemic position must you occupy in order for it to be true to say that you know something? Contextualists say that the answer varies with the context in which the attribution is made. A knowledge attribution might require one epistemic position when made in a “low standards” context, but a different, stronger epistemic position when made in a “high standards” context. The truth-conditions of knowledge attributions are thus, in a distinctly epistemic sense, context sensitive . What it means to claim that someone knows depends in part upon the context in which the claim is made.

The traditional opponent of the contextualist is the invariantist . Invariantists hold that the truth-conditions of knowledge claims are fixed across contexts. Invariantists differ among themselves about what those truth-conditions are, and in particular about the epistemic position required to know. Skeptical invariantists hold that knowledge is extremely epistemically demanding, while moderate invariantists think it is not so difficult to know things. Subject-sensitive invariantists think that the epistemic position required for knowledge depends on one’s situation. But all invariantists agree that what it means to claim that someone knows something doesn’t vary with the context in which the claim is made. Relativism is a newer competitor to contextualism, and a more radical departure from invariantism than is contextualism itself. According to the relativist, a particular knowledge claim can have different truth-values relative to different contexts of assessment. Even holding fixed the meaning of a knowledge claim and the underlying facts of the matter, the truth-value of the claim is not settled: it may be true for some, but false for others.

The debate about contextualism does not directly concern knowledge itself, though as we’ll see in section 4 , different versions of contextualism reflect different ideas about the nature of knowledge. Contextualism is a theory about knowledge claims, and hence is not a theory of knowledge but a “complement to any theory of knowledge” ( Heller 1999a , 115). Still, as Keith DeRose, a leading contextualist, points out, “it’s important in studying knowledge to discern what it means to say someone knows something” ( DeRose 2009 , 19). Contextualists hold that their view can be used to make progress on a range of epistemological problems, most notably the problem of radical skepticism.

The terms contextualism and invariantism were first used as names for these views about knowledge claims by Unger 1984 . Classic developments include Stine 1976 , Cohen 1988 , DeRose 1995 , Lewis 1996 , and Heller 1999a ; Rysiew 2011a (sec. 1) provides a thorough historical introduction. Early contextualism grew out of the “relevant alternatives” tradition in epistemology associated with Goldman 1976 and Dretske 1981 ; Pryor 2001 and Black 2003 situate contextualism in that framework. The present article provides an opinionated entry point to a number of current discussions concerning contextualism. After discussing the contextualist approach to skepticism (section 2 ), I will survey two key arguments for contextualism (section 3 ), and give an overview of debates among contextualists about how best to understand and develop their view (section 4 ). In the last decade a number of objections to contextualism’s adequacy as a linguistic thesis have emerged. These objections have made many epistemologists wary of endorsing contextualism. However, detailed and persuasive responses are available to each objection. In section 5 , I discuss several of the most prominent issues and show that there is little reason to balk at endorsing contextualism on empirical grounds. I close by considering some alternative accounts of our ordinary knowledge talk (section 6 ).

1.1 Other Contextualisms

“Contextualism” is used as a label for many philosophical views. Three distinct uses are relevant here. First, one can hold that the truth-conditions of any particular class of claims vary with the context of utterance, and thus endorse “contextualism” about such claims of a sort parallel to contextualism about knowledge claims. There are contextualist approaches to the semantics of causal-explanatory claims; modal language (“might,” “must,” “possibly,” “necessarily,” and so on); conditionals; evaluative terms (“good,” “bad”); normative claims involving “ought,” “should,” and so on; predicates of personal taste; and more. The language of epistemic possibility is obviously of central concern to epistemologists, and there are important connections between contextualism about epistemic modals and contextualism about knowledge claims ( DeRose 1991 ; Egan, Hawthorne, and Weatherson 2005 ; Egan and Weatherson 2011 ). Nonetheless while there is overlap between the literature and traditions relevant to contextualism about other terms and the work discussed in this article, once the details of the positions and arguments come into focus, there are few obvious or uncontroversial connections. So the focus here is exclusively on contextualism about knowledge claims.

Second, “contextualism” is used by philosophers of language as a label for the idea that linguistic meaning is deeply context-dependent. Recanati, for example, says that contextualists hold that “only in the context of a speech act does a sentence express a determinate content” ( Recanati 2005 , 171; see also Cappelen and Lepore 2005 (ch. 1) for an influential definition). Those who embrace contextualism in this sense are likely to be friendly to some form of contextualism about knowledge claims, but the converse needn’t hold. One may be a contextualist about knowledge claims while endorsing an austere view about the nature and extent of context-sensitivity in natural language.

Third, “contextualism” has been used by epistemologists for theories that have nothing directly to do with semantics. Most notably, Annis 1976 introduced it as a name for a distinctive view about the nature of epistemic justification. Williams 1991 (191) follows Annis’s use of the term, and in later work characterizes it as “the view that all justification takes place in an informational and dialectical context” ( Williams 2001 , 179). Though the Annis-Williams version of contextualism is not immediately connected with contextualism about knowledge claims, the views are not unrelated; elsewhere Williams says that “the fundamental idea of contextualism is that standards for correctly attributing or claiming knowledge are not fixed but subject to circumstantial variation” ( Williams 2001 , 159).

2. Contextualism and Skepticism

Every major contextualist has developed his or her version of the view with an eye towards relieving perennial skeptical anxieties. Most of the discussion has focused on a particular form of skeptical argument that DeRose 1995 calls the argument from ignorance (AI).

Consider one of the many obvious facts O that it ordinarily seems that you know, for example, that you have hands , and a radical skeptical hypothesis H on which things would seem to you just as they actually do, but O would be false, for example, that you are the victim of a Cartesian evil demon . It is not difficult to get into a frame of mind in which it seems that you don’t really know that H is false. In that state of mind, the following argument will appear troubling:

You don’t know that Not-H.

If you know that O, then you know that Not-H.

So, you don’t know that O.

Given that AI’s premises are compelling, there is pressure to accept its conclusion. But (AI3) is profoundly at odds with our ordinary perspective. If we wish to retain our ordinary perspective, how can we respond?

The defender of our ordinary perspective may deny (AI1), insisting that we do know Not-H. For this response to be satisfying, she needs an explanation for how we know Not-H. When H is well chosen, providing such an explanation is not an easy task. Alternatively, she may deny (AI2), holding that knowing O does not require knowing Not-H. But this response is at odds with independently plausible “closure” principles for knowledge: it seems that when you know P, you can extend your knowledge to include whatever you recognize that P entails. Moreover, the claim that one knows that O but not that Not-H is, in DeRose 1995 ’s phrase, an “abominable conjunction.” If this claim can be true, why does it seem so bizarre?

Contextualism offers a different path of resistance. Contextualists think that serious consideration of radical skeptical possibilities tends to raise the epistemic standards in the context to an extremely high level. Even our mundane beliefs rarely meet such extremely high epistemic standards. So serious consideration of Not-H tends, by the contextualist’s lights, to transform the context into one in which (AI1) expresses a truth. And given (AI2), which contextualists are keen to accept as true with respect to any context (though Heller 1999b provides a contrary view), the troubling conclusion follows. However, given that knowledge claims are context sensitive, the fact that (AI3) is true with respect to a skeptic-friendly context does not imply that it is true with respect to an ordinary context, where the epistemic standards are less demanding. Hence, the fact that AI is sound with respect to skeptic-friendly contexts is consistent with the truth of our ordinary knowledge claims. Cohen, 1986   1988 , 1999 , DeRose 1995 , Heller 1999a , Lewis 1996 , Neta 2004 , and Stine 1976 all offer accounts in this vein.

Unlike straightforward anti-skeptical responses to AI, the contextualist treatment denies neither premise. On the contrary, the contextualist accepts that, as uttered in skeptic-friendly contexts, AI’s premises are often true. The contextualist’s aim is not to defend our ordinary perspective by engaging with skeptics on their own turf. It is rather to limit the force of the skeptic’s challenge, obviating the need to provide such a defense in the first place ( Cohen 1988 , 113-114, 1999, 79–80; DeRose 1995 , 49–50). Once we understand how serious consideration of a skeptical hypothesis affects the truth-conditions of knowledge claims, we can recognize that our ordinary knowledge attributions are not undermined by the skeptic’s conclusion. In addition, the contextualist has a simple explanation for why AI is nonetheless so intuitively compelling: with respect to contexts where it’s considered seriously, its premises and conclusions are all apt to be true.

The contextualist treatment is successful, of course, only if contextualism itself is true; we’ll consider that question in sections 3 , 5 , and 6 . But even if contextualism is true, one may doubt that its attempt to disarm the skeptic is successful.

2.1 Evading Epistemology?

A number of theorists have argued that because of its epistemic neutrality, contextualism is of little relevance to the concerns that have animated discussion of the skeptical problem.

Suppose that knowledge claims are context sensitive and that our ordinary knowledge attributions are true. As Sosa points out, from the fact that people sometimes speak truly when they utter “I know that I have hands,” it does not follow that people ever know that they have hands ( Sosa 2000 , 4). Even if we accept contextualism we may still wonder whether we know that we have hands. Relatedly, Feldman complains that contextualists “make it correct to use the word ‘know,’ but they don’t address the interesting doubts that have been raised about whether we know much” ( Feldman 2001 , 62). Sosa and Feldman both think that the contextualist’s description of the conversational dynamics exploited by AI is plausible. But since contextualism is neutral concerning the question of what we can know, it does not engage with the issue at the heart of the skeptical dialectic.

The objection misses the point of the contextualist response. Given contextualism, the answer to the question “What do we know?” will vary with the epistemic standards in place in the context in which it is asked. Asking whether people know that they have hands without regard to a particular epistemic standard is, for the contextualist, like asking whether it is raining without regard to any particular location. If the question is whether we know anything by extremely high standards, then contextualists generally concede that we don’t. However, recognizing the standards-relative nature of the question removes the sting of that concession. DeRose says, “[O]nce I start to get a clear look at what it would take to ‘know’ according to the skeptic’s absolute standards, I find the distress caused by my failure to meet those standards to be minimal at best—perhaps to be compared with the ‘distress’ produced by the realization that I’m not omnipotent” ( DeRose 2004 ). On the other hand if the question is whether we know anything by ordinary standards, contextualists will insist that AI has done nothing to undermine our conviction that we do.

Yet it is not obvious that the AI-wielding skeptic leaves our ordinary knowledge claims unscathed. Kornblith considers the “full-blooded skeptic” who uses AI-style considerations to argue that “we have no more reason to believe that the world is as we take it to be than that it is altogether different or, indeed, that there is no such world at all” ( Kornblith 2000 , 25). The full-blooded skeptic’s intended target is any knowledge attribution, not just those made in skeptic-friendly contexts. Klein 2000 points out that the closure principle implies that our ordinary knowledge claims are true only if we know by ordinary standards that radical skeptical hypotheses are false. But, Klein’s skeptic argues, we “ cannot have any evidence whatsoever for believing” that such hypotheses are false ( Klein 2000 , 110, emphasis in original). Without an account of how we can know by ordinary standards that radical skeptical hypotheses are false, the contextualist’s reassurances are apt to ring hollow.

Contextualists have offered such accounts. Cohen says that while we lack evidence that we are not bodiless brains in vats, it is “intrinsically rational” to believe that we are not ( Cohen 1988 , 112; Cohen 1999 , 76–77). DeRose thinks, that provided the closest possible worlds where we falsely believe P are “quite distant” from the actual world, we can meet the relatively undemanding standards in place for knowing P in ordinary contexts ( DeRose 1995 , 35). Lewis says that in contexts where the possibility that P is false is “properly ignored,” one can “know P just by presupposing it”; the assumption is that skeptical hypotheses are properly ignored in ordinary contexts ( Lewis 1996 , 561; Stine 1976 ; Heller 1999a ). However plausible these proposals are, they go beyond what Feldman 2001 calls “bare contextualism,” but are substantive epistemological claims. The challenge of full-blooded skepticism shows that while contextualism provides a key element of a solution to the skeptical problem, direct engagement with epistemology is still required for a philosophically satisfying resolution.

2.2 The Contextualist Error Theory

If sound instances of AI do not threaten our ordinary knowledge claims, why do we find them troubling in the first place? Cohen and DeRose suggest that the appearance of trouble arises from a kind of error. On Cohen’s view, by failing “to distinguish between the standards that apply in skeptical contexts, and the standards that apply in everyday contexts,” we are misled “into thinking that certain knowledge ascriptions conflict, when in fact they are compatible” ( Cohen 1999 , 77). DeRose says that “we fail to realize [ … ] that the skeptic’s present denials that we know various things are perfectly compatible with our ordinary claims to know those very propositions” ( DeRose 1999 , sec. 6; 1995 , sec. 14; 2004 , sec. 8).

Schiffer 1996 argues that this “error theory” is implausible: we shouldn’t expect to be “bamboozled by our own words” in the way that it requires. If, because “knows” is context sensitive, knowledge denials made in skeptic-friendly contexts are consistent with knowledge attributions made in ordinary contexts, then we ought to recognize, more or less immediately upon careful reflection, that sound instances of AI leave our ordinary knowledge claims unscathed. Hofweber and Rysiew refine the objection. Hofweber allows that while there is plenty of what he calls “hidden relativity” in language, the contextualist error theory implies that “sameness, difference, and incompatibility of contents” is inaccessible to speakers. But, Hofweber thinks, it is implausible to posit such inaccessibility ( Hofweber 1999 ). Rysiew says that while speakers may be blind to what proposition a sentence literally expresses, they are rarely wrong about what they mean by uttering a sentence. But, he argues, the contextualist error theory requires this second claim ( Rysiew 2001 , 482–485).

Cohen responds that our ignorance of the context-sensitivity of other terms leads to analogous puzzles ( Cohen 1999 , 78–79; 2001, 90–91; 2005, 61). For example, a “flatness skeptic” argues that, owing to the ubiquity of tiny bumps, no actual surfaces are flat ( Unger 1975 , 54–62). The intuitive force of that argument is dissolved once we realize that flatness ascriptions are context sensitive. However, while it is easy to see that flatness denials made in contexts where even tiny bumps are important are compatible with flatness attributions made in ordinary contexts, the puzzle posed by AI is not readily dissolved by accepting that knowledge claims are context-sensitive. Cohen suggests that this difference in the puzzle-dissolving power of the contextualist approach in each case may be due to the fact that knowledge attributions have a “normative force” that flatness ascriptions lack (2005, 62). McKenna 2014 develops a position that makes Cohen’s suggestion more substantive. McKenna says that knowledge attributions have an important normative function; as a result, an ordinary knowledge attribution and the corresponding skeptical denial reflect a conflict that is not ameliorated by their truth-conditional compatibility. Such a residue of non-truth-conditional disagreement may obscure the fact that the truth-conditional content of the skeptic’s claim is consistent with that of our ordinary knowledge attributions.

DeRose says that when ordinary speakers are asked whether the conclusion of a skeptic’s argument contradicts an ordinary knowledge attribution, some will say “yes” and some will say “no” ( DeRose 2006 , 333–334; DeRose 2009 , 177–179). “Apparently,” he observes, “that’s just a tough question.” Given that there is disagreement among ordinary speakers about this issue, some must be mistaken. If the contextualist treatment of AI is independently plausible, then, it is reasonable to regard those who think that skeptical knowledge denials conflict with ordinary knowledge attributions as the ones in error.

Whether or not the contextualist error theory successfully explains why we find AI troubling in the first place, it is distinct from the contextualist treatment of AI itself. The latter is valuable independently of the former. Contextualism implies that compelling knowledge denials made in contexts in which skeptical hypotheses are in play are consistent with ordinary knowledge attributions. Contextualism may neither explain nor alleviate the concerns of an epistemologist who is keen to show that we know by even very demanding standards that there is an external world, but it does tell us that her failure will not undermine our ordinary knowledge claims. Thus contextualism provides a bulwark against the spread of skeptical anxieties, regardless of whether the error-theoretic hypothesis about the root of those anxieties is correct.

3 Arguments for Contextualism

Insofar as contextualism enables us to make progress on solving the skeptical problem, it is worth taking seriously. But contextualism is also independently plausible. As contextualists have argued, our ordinary knowledge talk appears to show that the truth-conditions of knowledge claims vary with the context in which they are made.

3.1 The Argument from Low-High Pairs

At the heart of the case for contextualism are pairs of imagined conversations concerning mundane concerns such as we encounter in everyday life. In one (the Low case), a speaker utters an instance of “S knows that P”; in the other (the High case), a speaker utters the corresponding instance of “S does not know that P.” In Low, it isn’t a matter of much practical significance whether P is true or false, and no unusual error possibilities are salient. In High, the practical stakes are high, and unusual error possibilities are salient. Considered from the perspectives of the conversations in which they are made, the attribution in Low and the denial in High are both natural and intuitively true. Contextualism accommodates and explains the truth of both “surface-contradictory” claims. Invariantism does neither, at least not straightforwardly. Thus Low-High pairs indicate that contextualism provides a better account of our ordinary knowledge talk than does invariantism.

The best-known Low-High pairs are DeRose’s Bank Cases (1992 , 913) and Cohen’s Airport Cases (1999 , 59). DeRose’s more recent Thelma and Louise Cases (2009, 4–5) are designed to repair a dialectical shortcoming of the earlier Bank Cases (section 7.3):

Thelma, Louise, and Lena are co-workers; their colleague John was in his office all day with his the door closed. All three saw John’s hat in the hallway and overheard a conversation whose participants presupposed that John was in his office. On these grounds they believe that John was in, though they did not see him. At the end of the day, Louise and Lena each head home, while Thelma stops at the local tavern to settle a small bet concerning whether John would be in that day. After her tavern-mates pay up, they ask her whether Lena knows that John was in, since she also had a small bet going on the question. Yes, Thelma answers: (L) Lena knows that John was in. Meanwhile, Louise is stopped by the police on her way home. They are investigating a serious crime, and need to verify whether John was at work today. They have no reason to doubt that he was, but need Louise’s testimony. She demurs, describing her evidence and belief that John was in, but pointing out that he may have left his hat on the hook the previous day, and that her co-workers who thought he was in may have been mistaken. After all, she points out, she didn’t actually see him. They follow up by asking whether Lena could testify to John’s whereabouts. No, Louise answers; she didn’t see him either: (H) Lena doesn’t know that John was in.

Considered with respect to the contexts in which they are made, both Thelma’s utterance of (L) and Louise’s utterance of (H) are natural and intuitively true. But their utterances are simultaneous, and concern the same subject (Lena) and the same fact (that John was in). Contextualism accommodates the intuitive truth of both claims, and explains why Thelma’s knowledge attribution and Louise’s knowledge denial are both true. Invariantists cannot regard both as true. Thus contextualism reflects our ordinary knowledge talk better than invariantism does. Prominent non-contextualist strategies for accommodating the data from Low-High pairs will be addressed in sections 6.1 , 6.2 , 6.3 , and 6.4 .

3.2 The Argument from Assertability

One response to the argument from Low-High pairs is to hold that what varies between the cases are not the truth-conditions of the knowledge claims, but their assertability conditions. The epistemic standards for warranted assertion appear to vary with context; this may explain why both claims are natural and intuitively true (this response is related to the invariantist strategy discussed in section 6.2 ).

The warranted assertability response leads to a distinct argument for contextualism ( Hambourger 1987 , DeRose 2002 , DeRose 2009 , ch. 3). What epistemic position warrants assertion? According to a popular account, a speaker’s epistemic position is sufficient for making a warranted assertion of P just in case she knows that P ( Unger 1975 , ch. 6; Williamson 2000 , ch. 11). A contextualist will rephrase the account along the following lines: a speaker’s epistemic position is sufficient for making a warranted assertion of P in context C just in case it would be true in C to attribute knowledge to her that P ( DeRose 2009 , 98–102). Invariantists should not have qualms with the rephrasing, since on their view the relativization to context is superfluous. But given that the epistemic position needed to make a warranted assertion varies with context, the link between assertability and knowledge implies that the epistemic position required for the truth of a knowledge attribution varies with context as well.

Blackson 2004 objects that the argument, even if sound, does not establish contextualism. It establishes rather that the epistemic position required for a subject to truly claim that she knows something can vary with features of the context in which she finds herself. But this variability can also be accommodated by subject-sensitive invariantism (section 6.3 ). DeRose agrees with Blackson’s assessment, but thinks contextualism is superior to subject-sensitive invariantism on independent grounds ( DeRose 2009 , 108).

A number of theorists deny that knowledge is necessary for assertability (e.g., Douven 2006 , Kvanvig 2009 , Lackey 2007 , and Weiner 2005 ); others deny that it is sufficient (e.g., Brown 2010 and Lackey 2011 ). If knowledge and assertability are delinked, the argument is undermined. The claim that the epistemic requirement for warranted assertion varies with context has also been challenged. Turri 2010 proposes that the type of speech act one performs by making an assertoric utterance varies with context; he calls this view speech-act contextualism . Speakers in epistemically demanding contexts do not (merely) assert, but guarantee ; the epistemic requirements for warranted guaranteeing are more stringent.

4. Varieties of Contextualism

Contextualism is a broad tent. In this section, I’ll survey two intra-contextualist debates about how best to develop the view. The first concerns the contents of knowledge claims. What, more specifically, do knowledge claims mean, and how does this meaning fluctuate with the epistemically relevant features of the context of utterance? Contextualists have proposed a wide variety of answers, and the differences among them reflect differences among theories about the nature of knowledge itself. The second concerns the linguistic mechanism that accounts for the context-sensitivity of knowledge claims. Contextualism has traditionally been treated as the view that the proposition expressed by a knowledge sentence varies with the context of utterance: that “know” is an indexical term. But recent authors have proposed different theoretical frameworks for understanding the relationship between the context sensitivity of knowledge claims and the semantics of knowledge sentences.

4.1 Contextualist Truth-Conditions

The dominant framework for contextualist thinking about the contents of knowledge claims has been the relevant alternatives approach to knowledge, on which knowing that P involves being in a position to rule out relevant alternatives to P. If we understand “relevant” to mean “relevant to those attributing knowledge,” then the relevant alternatives approach naturally leads to a version of contextualism:

(RA-C) “S knows that P” is true with respect to C only if S can rule out the alternatives to P relevant in C.

On the RA-C picture, the epistemic standard in a context is understood in terms of the set of alternatives relevant in that context. Such a proposal is at the heart of many classic and more recent contextualist theories, including Stine 1976 , Cohen 1988 , Lewis 1996 , Heller 1999a , Blome-Tillman 2009 , Ichikawa 2011 , and McKenna 2013 . Opinions among these authors vary widely about how to characterize relevance, the relationship between relevance, psychological salience, and practical circumstances, and what it is to “rule out” an alternative.

Another influential approach echoes the theory of knowledge defended by Nozick 1981 , who held that knowledge requires sensitive belief; that is, a belief that would not be held if it were false. DeRose recasts the sensitivity requirement as a “conversational rule” that fixes the epistemic standards governing knowledge attributions in a context. His “Rule of Sensitivity” states that when a speaker attributes knowledge that P to S, the epistemic standards should be set as high as they need to be so that the knowledge attribution is true only if S’s belief that P is sensitive ( DeRose 1995 , sec. 12). DeRose argues that the Rule of Sensitivity underwrites a contextualist treatment of AI superior to various RA-based treatments.

Contextualists of a more “internalist” bent understand the variation in standards in terms of the type or degree of justification, evidence, or reasons a subject must possess. Though originally couched in the RA framework, Cohen’s view is an example of this approach. He says that what varies is “how justified a belief must be” or “how good one’s reasons have to be” ( Cohen 1999 , 59–60; Cohen 1988 , sections IV and V). Neta’s version of contextualism also starts from an internalist picture of knowledge as involving evidential justification, but on Neta’s view, what varies with context are which states count as evidence; the context-sensitivity of knowledge attributions is parasitic on the context-sensitivity of evidence attributions ( Neta 2004 ).

Not all versions of contextualism are best understood in terms of higher and lower standards. On Schaffer’s “contrastivist” theory, knowledge is a three-place relation between a subject, a proposition, and a contrast proposition ( Schaffer 2004a ). For the contrastivist one never knows that P simpliciter ; one always knows that P rather than Q . As a result, the truth-conditions of “binary” knowledge attributions vary with the contrast proposition supplied by context: when Q is the salient contrast to P, an utterance of “S knows that P” is true iff the subject knows P rather than Q; but when R is the salient contrast, an utterance of “S knows that P” is true iff the subject knows P rather than R. For contrastivist contextualists, what shifts are contrasts, not epistemic standards. (Schaffer himself says that contrastivism is a competitor to, rather than a version of, contextualism (2004a, sec. 1), but the view he characterizes as “contextualism” involves a number of commitments inessential to contextualism as understood in the present essay.)

Another family of contextualist theories starts with the idea that knowledge involves causal-explanatory relations. Greco 2010 argues that knowledge is a kind of “success through ability.” This means that a subject’s true belief that P is “creditable” to her intellectual abilities, which implies that her abilities causally explain her success in believing truly. Since causal explanations are context-sensitive, “knowledge attributions inherit the context-sensitivity of causal explanations” ( Greco 2010 , 106). Rieber 1998 says that when a subject knows that P, the fact that P explains why she believes that P. But whether A counts as “the explanation” of B varies with what contrast to B is implicit in the context, and so the claim that one thing explains another is context-sensitive. Thus “the context-dependency of explanation can account for the context-dependency of knowledge” ( Rieber 1998 , 194).

4.2. Contextualism and Knowledge Sentences

Traditional contextualists hold that the proposition expressed by a knowledge sentence varies with the context of utterance. Cohen says that he “construes ‘knowledge’ as an indexical” ( Cohen 1988 , 97), and DeRose encourages thinking of contextualism in terms of Kaplan 1989 ’s distinction between character and content, a central element of his hugely influential theory of indexicals ( DeRose 1999 , 920; 2009 , 3). Indexical terms encode different contents in different contexts of utterance; as a result, sentences containing indexicals express different propositions relative to different contexts of utterance. Following MacFarlane 2009 , I’ll call the proposal that “know” functions semantically like an indexical, indexical contextualism . If the content “know” contributes to the contents of sentences that contain it varies with the context of utterance, then the propositions expressed by those sentences vary as well. This explains why the truth-conditions of knowledge claims vary with context.

There are various ways to develop indexical contextualism. One may treat “know” as what Schiffer 1996 calls an “indexical verb”: on this picture, the semantic content of “know” is simply the knowledge relation salient in the context, just as (for example) the semantic content of “I” is simply the speaker of the context. Instead, indexical contextualists may assign “know” a more complex semantic content with a typically unpronounced element that accounts for its indexicality. For example, “S knows that P” may encode the content that S knows that P according to N , where N denotes the epistemic standard of the context. Kompa 2002 , Brogaard 2008 , and MacFarlane 2009 develop an alternative that Brogaard calls perspectivalism and MacFarlane calls nonindexical contextualism . Suppose that the sentence “Obama was born in Hawaii” encodes the proposition that Obama was born in Hawaii . That proposition is true at the actual world but false at a possible world where Obama was born somewhere else, or never at all: though it contains no indexicals, its truth-value varies with the possible world at which it is being evaluated. Some theorists think that a proposition’s truth-value can also vary with the time of evaluation; for example, that Obama was born in Hawaii may be true at a 2014 circumstance but not true at a 1914 circumstance. Nonindexical contextualists claim that the truth-value of a proposition varies with the epistemic standard at which it’s evaluated. If so, the proposition that Descartes knew that Galileo was condemned may be true at a low epistemic standard but false at a high epistemic standard. Assuming that the epistemic standard relevant to the truth-value of a knowledge claim is that of the context of utterance, nonindexical contextualism implies that the truth-conditions of a knowledge claim may vary with the context of utterance even if “know” is not indexical.

Brogaard and MacFarlane argue that nonindexical contextualism can resist certain influential objections to contextualism discussed later in this article (sections 6.2 and 6.3 ). Non-indexical contextualism bears a strong resemblance to MacFarlane’s influential version of relativism (section 7.4); the primary difference with MacFarlane’s relativism concerns which context sets the epistemic standard relevant to a knowledge claim’s truth-value.

A third approach distinguishes sharply between the contents encoded by knowledge sentences and the propositions asserted by speakers who make knowledge claims. What a speaker asserts by uttering a sentence is not always the content encoded by the uttered sentence with respect to the context of utterance. For example, consider Bach 1994 ’s example of a mother who utters “You’re not going to die” to comfort her son who’s gotten a minor scrape. The proposition encoded by that sentence is true only if her son is immortal, but she has asserted merely that he is not going to die from this scrape . When by uttering s in C a speaker asserts a proposition not encoded by s with respect to C, her assertion is pragmatically enriched ( Recanati 2012 ). Pragmatic contextualism says that the epistemic standards in a context affect how knowledge claims made in that context are pragmatically enriched. Thus, even if the contents of knowledge sentences are invariant, the truth-conditions of knowledge claims vary with the epistemic standards of the context.

Rysiew thinks that the speakers in Low and High “say something true,” not because of what is “ semantically encoded or expressed by the sentence itself ,” but rather because of the “ conceptually and pragmatically enriched proposition[s]” conveyed by their utterances ( Rysiew 2001 , 486, emphasis in original; Rysiew 2007 develops the proposal further). Cappelen 2005 argues that, while instances of “S knows that P” encode an invariant content that is typically false, speakers who utter “S knows that P” typically assert distinct truths. Both Rysiew and Cappelen present themselves as opponents of contextualism, but indexical contextualism is their real target; their views are versions of pragmatic contextualism. Harman 2007 , in a similar vein, treats contextualism as a “theory of primary speaker meaning.” And Stainton 2010 defends what he calls “speech-act contextualism” (not to be confused with Turri’s view of the same name discussed in section 3.2 ) by appeal to the idea that pragmatic factors affect the literal contents of an assertion; Stainton argues that the speech-act contextualist is invulnerable to linguistic objections to indexical contextualism (in particular those discussed in sections 6.1 and 6.2 ). And Pynn 2015 defends a version of pragmatic contextualism on which High context knowledge denials are instances of lexical narrowing.

5. Objections to Contextualism

Since it first appeared on the scene, contextualism has faced an array of objections. The first wave of criticism focused primarily on the adequacy of the contextualist treatment of skeptical arguments (sections 2.2 and 2.3 ). The second wave, which I’ll focus on in this section, targeted contextualism’s plausibility as an empirical linguistic thesis. These objections have led many to become wary of endorsing contextualism. In this section I will familiarize the reader with some of the most prominent such objections, most of which interact with complex issues in the philosophy of language, and put forward a piecemeal argument that the objections are not compelling. Contextualists have responded to each in careful detail, and in each case the objection turns out to depend upon observations or theoretical commitments that contextualists may freely deny. I’ll first discuss in some detail three influential “linguistic” objections to contextualism (sections 5.1 – 5.3 ), briefly describe three more (section 5.4 ), and close with an overview of some recent work on knowledge claims in experimental philosophy (section 5.5 ).

5.1 Gradability

Cohen 1999 defends contextualism in part by appeal to an analogy between “know” and gradable adjectives such as “flat,” “bald,” “rich,” “happy,” and “sad.” Such terms are semantically linked to scales; the degree on the scale specified by a particular use of the term varies with context. Similarly, Cohen suggests, the strength of epistemic position specified by a particular use of “know” varies with context. Stanley presents a number of considerations to undermine the analogy between “know” and gradable terms. For example, unlike gradable terms, “know” does not accept modifiers such as “very” or “really”; nor is it associated with comparative constructions like “happier than.” So, Stanley concludes, we should be “at the very least suspicious” of the claim that “know” is semantically linked to a scale of epistemic position ( Stanley 2004 , 130; Stanley 2005 , ch. 2).

However, Stanley’s view that terms that do not pass his tests for gradability are not linked to scales has been challenged. Halliday 2007 points out that while “sufficiently tall” is both context sensitive and linked to a scale, it fails Stanley’s tests for gradability. Blome-Tillman 2008 says that whether a noise is loud enough to count as a snore varies with context, suggesting a semantic link between “snore” and a scale of loudness. Yet “snore” fails Stanley’s tests as badly as “know” does. Moreover, just as “snore” accepts adverbial modifiers that denote degrees of loudness (e.g., “very / quite / extremelyloudly”), “know” accepts modifiers that denote degrees of epistemic position (e.g., “with very / quite / extremely good evidence / justification”; Ludlow 2005 , 19–21 provides a long list of other such modifiers).

Moreover, as Stanley acknowledges, the thesis that “know” is not semantically linked to a scale of epistemic position is entirely consistent with contextualism; there are other forms of context-sensitivity than those associated with gradability ( Partee 2004 ). The gradability objection is part of Stanley’s “larger inductive argument” against contextualism ( Stanley 2005 , 52). The challenge for the contextualist who accepts the gradability objection is to find another family of context-sensitive terms that can serve as a plausible model for the semantics of “know.” Stanley thinks that other problems indicate that none of the candidates is plausible. As we’ll see in the rest of this section, however, the other linguistic objections to contextualism are less than overwhelming.

Finally, the gradability objection appears to have no force against nonindexical and pragmatic contextualism. Nonindexical contextualists treat the semantics of “know” in a way quite unlike the standard treatment of gradable adjectives. And Stainton argues that, due to pragmatic enrichment, the claims we make using terms that are not gradable can themselves be “subject to degrees” ( Stainton 2010 , 128).

5.2 Indirect Reports

When someone utters a sentence s , you can often report her utterance by saying, “He said that s ”; that is, by using a disquotational indirect speech report . However, when s contains an indexical term like “I,” “here,” and “now,” disquotational reports of utterances of that sentence break down. For example, if Julie uttered “I’m hungry” and you’re not Julie, you can’t report Julie’s utterance by saying, “Julie said that I’m hungry.” Some opponents of contextualism claim that disquotational reports of knowledge sentences are accurate across contexts with different epistemic standards ( Cappelen and Lepore 2005 , ch. 7; Stanley 2005 , ch. 3). Hawthorne makes an analogous claim about disquotational indirect belief reports ( Hawthorne 2004 , 98–111). These observations undermine the analogy between “know” on the one hand and “I,” “here,” and “now” on the other, and so present a challenge for the indexical contextualist.

Proponents of the objection do not generally argue for the claim that the relevant disquotational reports are unproblematic. Cappelen and Lepore, for example, list it among their “reports of [their] own intuitions” ( Cappelen and Lepore 2005 , 94). Not all share the intuition. DeRose, for example, disagrees with Hawthorne that the relevant indirect belief reports are unproblematic ( DeRose 2009 , 162–166; DeRose 2006 ). When we focus on cases like those involving Thelma and Louise, DeRose says, we’ll find that they are “far from being clearly correct” and even, in DeRose’s judgment, “at least somewhat clearly wrong.” Analogous points apply to disquotational speech reports involving “know” as well.

Even if some cross-contextual disquotational reports involving “know” are wholly unproblematic, this is troubling only if all context-sensitive terms lead to breakdowns of disquotational reports in a like manner. But as DeRose 2006 (337–331; DeRose 2009 , 166–174) points out, there are no relevant differences between the behavior of “tall” and “know” in indirect belief reports; Blome-Tillman 2008 (36–38) makes a similar observation about the behavior of “empty” and “flat” in indirect speech reports. Yet “empty,” “flat,” and “tall” are widely held to be context sensitive. Cappelen and Hawthorne 2009 argue that the fact that a term does not block disquotational reports provides little evidence that it is not context sensitive. They suggest that felicitous cross-contextual disquotational reports involving context-sensitive terms often involve “parasitic context-sensitivity”: the values of the context-sensitive terms in the report are “parasitically determined” by the context of the reported utterance ( Cappelen and Hawthorne 2009 , 40–42). If the suggestion is right, then felicitous cross-contextual reports of knowledge claims do not undermine contextualism.

Finally, the objection has no force against forms of contextualism that reject the thesis that “know” functions semantically like an indexical. MacFarlane argues that nonindexical contextualism is immune: since the content of a knowledge sentence is stable across contexts, we should expect disquotational reports of knowledge claims to be accurate across contexts ( MacFarlane 2009 , 239–241). And Stainton suggests that the pragmatic contextualist can resist the objection as well ( Stainton 2010 , 127–128). Pynn 2015 (sec. 5) develops Stainton’s suggestion in detail, showing that the pragmatic contextualist has nothing to fear from the behavior of “know” in disquotational reports.

5.3 Cross-Contextual Judgments

The argument from Low-High pairs assumes that the correct semantic theory of knowledge claims should comport with our intuitions about the truth and falsity of those claims. Unlike invariantism, contextualism respects the judgments of speakers in Low and High cases about the truth-values of the knowledge claims they themselves make. But according to a number of theorists, contextualism does not respect the judgments of ordinary speakers about the truth and falsity of knowledge claims made in contexts other than their own. Consider a knowledge attribution made in a Low context and the corresponding knowledge denial made in a High context. Participants in High will (the objection goes) not only regard their own knowledge denial as true, but also judge the attribution made in Low to be inconsistent with their knowledge denial. Contextualism implies that the attribution and denial are consistent; indeed, that both are true. The alleged failure of contextualism to comport with our cross-contextual judgments about knowledge claims undermines its claim to respect ordinary speaker intuitions.

The primary evidence cited in favor of the objection rests on observations concerning when expressions of disagreement and retraction are natural. For example, consider the following exchange imagined by Williamson:

John: I know that this is a zebra. Mary: How do you know that it isn’t a mule cleverly painted to look like a zebra? John: Hmm, for all I know it is a painted mule. So I was wrong. I don’t know that it is a zebra after all ( Williamson 2005 , 220; see also Richard 2004 ; Stanley 2005 , 52; MacFarlane 2005 , 202–203; Chrisman 2007 , 228–229; Brogaard 2008 , 411).

John’s use of “I was wrong” and “after all” in response to Mary’s question indicate that he disagrees with and intends to retract his earlier attribution.

But cases like Williamson’s only have force against a view that implies that John’s attribution and subsequent denial are consistent. And while contextualists could regard John’s claims as consistent, contextualism does not imply that they are. On the contrary, since contextualists have no wish to erase genuine disputes about knowledge, they have reason to treat John’s claims as inconsistent. The contextualist may deny that Mary’s intervention has shifted the epistemic standard. Montminy points out that unless we know more about the “presuppositions, purposes, intentions, etc. of the conversational participants, it is unclear whether the epistemic standards associated with John’s knowledge attribution are different from those associated with his knowledge denial” ( Montminy 2009a , 642). Rather than shifting the standards, Mary may have made explicit a possibility that John should have been attending to in the first place, or she may have pressed John to consider a possibility he is free to ignore, and so led him astray. Alternatively, the contextualist may accept that Mary’s intervention has shifted the standard but still regard the claims as inconsistent. This is DeRose’s treatment. He gives an account of cases like Williamson’s on which the latter claim conflicts with the former even given a shift in standards; see his discussion of the “assymetrical gap view” of what he calls “one-way disagreements” ( DeRose 2009 , 150–151).

Still, while Williamson’s case needn’t make trouble for the contextualist, she must hold that some “surface-contradictory” pairs of knowledge claims are consistent; this is, after all, the basis on which contextualism is claimed to capture a key feature of our ordinary knowledge talk. But DeRose points out that when we focus on “properly constructed cases”—that is, the sorts of cases best suited to underwrite the argument from Low-High pairs—it is far from obvious that our cross-contextual judgments are at odds with contextualism ( DeRose 2009 , 160–161). Suppose that the police, in their conversation with Louise, played her a tape of Thelma’s knowledge attribution. Provided that Louise is aware of the casual nature of Thelma’s tavern conversation and carefully attending to the contrast with her own very serious situation, it is odd to think that she would say, “I disagree with Thelma; she is wrong.” It would be at least as natural for her to say, “Thelma was only speaking loosely; she wouldn’t say that if she were here right now,” or, “She didn’t mean that Lena knows .” Unless a firm expression of disagreement would be natural, the case provides little grist for the anti-contextualist mill.

Finally, even if there are clear examples of a tension between contextualism and our intuitive cross-contextual judgments, this is hardly a decisive objection. McKenna 2014 argues that the normative function of knowledge claims gives rise to a form of cross-contextual disagreement that can persist even when the relevant claims are both true. Cross-contextual judgments of inconsistency may reflect the “conflicting recommendations” of the speakers in each context. Brogaard 2008 (453–455) argues that given nonindexical contextualism, a High speaker can truly judge that the Low knowledge attribution was false (though see MacFarlane 2014 , 190–192, who argues that while nonindexical contextualism handles the disagreement data better than indexical contextualism, it fails to explain why speakers should be led to retract). Moreover, the tension between invariantism and our intra-contextual judgments is rather more stark than that between contextualism and any judgments of cross-contextual inconsistency: the invariantist must regard one of the speakers (as well as those of us considering her claim) as mistaken about the truth-conditions of a claim she herself makes, and not merely those of a claim made in a distinct context. (Here relativists claim a distinct advantage over both contextualism and invariantism; see section 6.4 .) It is more charitable to speakers to attribute to them an error about the truth-conditions of a claim made in a context they are considering at a distance than it is to attribute to them an error about the truth-conditions of their own claims.

5.4 Other “Linguistic” Objections

A number of other claims to the effect that our linguistic behavior is not as we should expect it to be given contextualism have been discussed in the literature:

Propositional Anaphora . Stanley 2005 , 52–53 says that various uses of the locution “what I said” that should be true given contextualism are infelicitous. Suppose it is raining outside and I say, “It is raining here.” Moments later when I move inside, I can say, “What I said before is true, but it’s not raining here.” Could Louise felicitously say of Thelma, “What she said is true, but Lena doesn’t know that John was in”? It seems not; Stanley claims that this undermines the claim that “know” is context sensitive. Intra-Discourse Switching . Stanley 2005 , 57 says that, for a broad range of context-sensitive terms, “multiple occurrences of that element in a discourse should be able to take on differing values.” For example, one can felicitously say, “That butterfly is large, but that elephant isn’t large” even when the elephant is much larger than the butterfly. Yet felicitous readings of “Sam knows that his car is in the driveway, but he doesn’t know that it hasn’t been stolen” are, according to Stanley, unavailable. Clarification Techniques . Hawthorne 2004 , 104–106 says that, for most context sensitive terms, various clarification techniques are available for elaborating what we meant by using the term when challenged. For example, if I say, “The glass is empty” and you challenge me by pointing out that it has air in it, I can respond by clarifying: “All I was meant was that it was empty of vodka .” But, Hawthorne claims, we have very few such techniques for clarifying what’s meant by a “know”-involving utterance in response to a challenge.

In each case, the contextualist can either dispute the objector’s data or resist the anti-contextualist inference from the data. As an example of the first kind of response, consider Ludlow 2005 ’s catalogue of natural techniques culled from Google searches for clarifying knowledge claims; Ludlow’s many examples stand in prima facie tension with Hawthorne’s observation. As an example of the second kind of response, note that, since “S knows that P” is true only if P is true, the contextualized version of the knowledge norm of assertion (section 3.2 ) implies that a High context speaker should not assert that a Low context knowledge attribution was true. This explains why a Louise can’t felicitously utter, “What Thelma said was true, but Lena doesn’t know that John was in,” even if such an utterance would (as contextualism is held to predict) be true. For a different and contextualist-friendly approach to the data that underwrite the intra-discourse switching objection see DeRose 2008 , sec. 6.

5.5 Experimental Evidence

Recent work in “experimental philosophy” has focused on the attitudes of experimental subjects towards cases like those involved in the argument from Low-High pairs. Some of the results have been taken to undermine the case for contextualism. For example, Schaffer and Knobe, surveying the data, say that “the results suggest that people simply do not have the intuitions they were purported to have” by contextualists and their opponents, suggesting that “the whole contextualism debate was founded on a myth” ( Schaffer and Knobe 2012 , 675). If correct, this observation seriously threatens the argument from Low-High pairs, and the truth of contextualism itself.

However, more recent experimental data supports, rather than undermines, the argument from Low-High pairs. That argument makes an abductive inference to contextualism from a claim about the intuitive truth of knowledge attributions and denials:

(T-T) The knowledge attributions made by speakers in Low context vignettes are natural and intuitively true, and the corresponding knowledge denials made by speakers in High context vignettes are also natural and intuitively true.

Three studies have tested (T-T) directly. Feltz and Zarpentine 2010 presented subjects with Low and High vignettes modeled on Stanley’s versions of the Bank Cases and asked them to agree or disagree that “What [the speaker] said was true.” They found that subjects tended to be neutral; that is, that they tended neither to agree nor disagree. While this result does not help the case for contextualism, it does not clearly undermine it, either ( DeRose 2011 , 91–94). More recent work has been more decisive. Hansen and Chemla “confirmed DeRose’s prediction that speakers would find both ‘I know that p’ in the Low context and ‘I don’t know that p’ in the High context true” ( Hansen and Chemla 2013 , 203). And Buckwalter 2014 also confirmed (T-T) using surveys based on the Bank Cases. Buckwalter concludes that “contextualism has been shown to be compatible with the relevant knowledge behaviors” of ordinary subjects. 1

The bulk of the experimental work on knowledge claims and Low-High pairs concerns the knowledge claims that experimental subjects themselves make concerning those characters. A central interest has been to identify what factors can produce a shift in judgments about whether a character knows. Some argue that manipulation of the perceived stakes of the character’s situation is responsible for the shift ( Pinillos 2012 , Pinillos and Simpson 2014 , and Sripada and Stanley 2012 ), while others maintain that shifts are brought about by the salience of error possibilities ( Buckwalter 2014 , Buckwalter and Schaffer 2013 , May et al. 2010 , and Schaffer and Knobe 2012 ). This debate is relevant to a number of issues of interest to contextualists. For example, it should help guide our understanding of how and why the truth-conditions of knowledge claims shift (section 4.1 ). And while contextualism per se makes no prediction about what factors produce the shift, the outcome of the debate may indirectly impact contextualism’s plausibility. For example, evidence for the stakes hypothesis bolsters the case for subject-sensitive invariantism, an alternative to contextualism (section 6.3 ), and Pinillos 2012 argues that the results of his interesting “evidence-seeking” experiments favor subject-sensitive invariantism over contextualism. So contextualists cannot afford to be insouciant about this growing literature.

6. Alternatives to Contextualism

The traditional competitor to contextualism is invariantism; the primary challenge for the invariantist is to respond to the argument from Low-High pairs. In this section I’ll describe three invariantist strategies for accounting for the Low-High data, and close by discussing the relativist alternative.

6.1 Pragmatic Factors

The invariantist may attempt to explain the variability exhibited in Low-High pairs in terms of the conversational propriety or communicative effects of knowledge claims. An assertion whose content is true may nonetheless be misleading or otherwise improper, while a false assertion may be informative and proper. Invariantists who attempt to explain the divergence in intuitive truth-conditions exhibited in Low-High pairs in such terms offer pragmatic accounts of the data. In the literature such accounts are often referred to as examples of what DeRose 2002 calls a warranted assertability maneuver , or WAM (section 3.2 ). Black 2005 , Brown 2006 , Hazlett 2007 , Pritchard 2010 , Rysiew 2001 , Rysiew 2007 , and Schaffer 2004b are prominent examples.

Some attempt to account for the apparent truth of one of the knowledge claims in a Low-High pair in terms of Grice 1989 ’s notion of conversational implicature . Hazlett, for example, says that since a High context speaker who made a true knowledge attribution would falsely implicate that the subject can eliminate contextually salient error possibilities, High context speakers instead assert false knowledge denials in order to communicate truly that the subject can’t eliminate such possibilities ( Hazlett 2007 , 682–687; Brown 2006 , 419–428 and Black 2005 ). One common objection to implicature-based accounts is that in canonical examples of implicature we seem capable of distinguishing the falsehood that we assert from the truth we thereby implicate, yet the knowledge claims in Low-High pairs seem true, not false but informative.

Rysiew’s proposal relies not on implicature but on “earlier” pragmatic effects such as Recanati 1989 ’s strengthening and Bach 1994 ’s impliciture ( Rysiew 2007 , 641–648, esp. footnote 31; DeRose 2009 , 118–124 responds to Rysiew’s proposal on behalf of the contextualist). The key difference, for our purposes, between these effects and implicature is that they do not depend upon the speaker’s intending to communicate the literal content of the uttered sentence. Rysiew’s finely crafted view is clearly opposed to indexical contextualism, but since he agrees that in one sense “what is said” by speakers who make knowledge attributions varies with epistemically relevant features of the context of utterance, pragmatic contextualists should find it congenial, as well ( Rysiew 2001 , 485–487).

Davis 2007 pursues a different sort of pragmatic strategy. Davis endorses a form of skeptical invariantism, but treats knowledge attributions made in Low contexts as examples of loose use ( Conee 2005 , 52–53 and Fantl and McGrath 2012 also discuss this approach). Loose talk is ubiquitous. When there are only a few grounds of coffee left in the jar, it may be strictly false, but informative and appropriate, to say that there is no coffee left (e.g., when there is not enough coffee left to brew a full pot). Similarly, Davis suggests, in Low contexts “know” is used loosely; the knowledge attribution made in Low is close enough to being true for practical purposes. DeRose 2012 agrees with Davis that loose talk is ubiquitous, but thinks that such talk is often truthful; the standards of precision in a context, on DeRose’s suggestion, are truth-conditionally relevant. Given DeRose’s suggestion, Davis’s proposal yields a version of contextualism, not invariantism.

6.2 Psychological Factors

Focusing on unusual error possibilities or high stakes may lead you to modify your beliefs. Since knowledge requires belief, a subject who has lost her belief that P can truly deny that she knows that P. If a subject in a High context loses her belief that P, she can truly deny that she knows that P, even if her epistemic position is sufficient for knowing P. Bach says that, in a High context, the speaker’s “threshold for (confidently) believing” goes up, so that she “demands more evidence than knowledge requires” before she is willing to believe the relevant proposition ( Bach 2005 , 77). In a series of rich and empirically well-informed papers, Jennifer Nagel develops a sophisticated account along these lines (Nagel, 2008   2010a , 2010b ). Nagel says that subjects in high-stakes situations experience a high “need for closure”; that is, they require more information before forming settled beliefs than do subjects in low-stakes situations ( Nagel 2008 ). She calls the force underlying this phenomenon “epistemic anxiety” ( Nagel 2010a ). Experiencing heightened epistemic anxiety, speakers in High contexts refrain from forming settled beliefs and so truly deny that they know.

One objection to the Bach-Nagel strategy is that we seem able to suppose that the speakers in High contexts have settled beliefs without making their knowledge denials any less natural or intuitively true; indeed, descriptions of High cases can include a stipulation that the speakers do have the relevant belief (though, see Nagel 2008 , 290–293 for doubts about the effectiveness of such stipulations). Additionally, the strategy does not account directly for the intuitive truth of third-person knowledge denials like Louise’s. Since Lena is not part of the conversation with the police, the high stakes haven’t led her to lose her belief. Bach and Nagel both explain third-person High context knowledge denials in terms of an error on the part of the High context speaker. Nagel 2010b argues that due to a bias called “epistemic egoism,” High context speakers project their own epistemic anxiety on to third parties; Bach 2005 , p. 76–77 provides a similar explanation.

Williamson offers a different psychological explanation for High context knowledge denials. He says that when we focus on unusual possibilities of error, we tend to give them undue weight in our judgments about knowledge, and so experience an “illusion of epistemic danger” ( Williamson 2005 , 225–226). High context subjects thus mistakenly judge that their epistemic position is insufficient for knowledge. Following Vogel 1990 and Hawthorne 2004 , Williamson suggests that Kahneman and Tversky’s “availability heuristic” might explain the illusion. Nagel 2010b criticizes Wliiamson’s appeal to the availability heuristic, but the core of his suggestion—that speakers in High contexts are vulnerable to a kind of illusion—may be salvageable. One advantage of Williamson’s proposal over the Bach-Nagel strategy is that it does not require positing a distinct factor to explain the apparent truth of a third-person denial: the illusion of epistemic danger should affect first-person and third-person denials equally. Pynn 2014 criticizes Williamson’s illusion solution but argues that our tacit acceptance of the principle that those who know are in a position to assert leads High context speakers to make a similar error. For another proposal in the Williamsonian vein, see Gerken 2013 ’s discussion of “epistemic focal bias.”

6.3 Subject-Sensitive Invariantism

Traditional invariantists hold that, for any two subjects in the same epistemic position with respect to P, either both subjects are in a position to know that P, or neither are. This reflects a commitment to what Stanley 2005 calls intellectualism about knowledge ( Fantl and McGrath 2009 call the same idea purism ). Anti-intellectualists hold that whether a subject is in a position to know can depend on other aspects of her situation, and in particular on her practical circumstances: for example, when the costs to the subject of being wrong about P are high, a stronger epistemic position is required for her to know that P than when the costs are low. Combining invariantism with anti-intellectualism yields a view known as subject-sensitive invariantism ( Hawthorne 2004 ; Stanley 2005 calls the view interest-relative invariantism ).

Subject-sensitive invariantism fits nicely with the Low-High pairs originally used to motivate contextualism. For example, in DeRose 1992 ’s Bank Cases, the subject in both cases is Keith. In the Low case, Keith claims to know that the bank will be open on Saturday; in the High case, Keith denies that he knows that the bank will be open on Saturday. Subject-sensitive invariantists can respect the truth of both claims: the practical difference between Keith’s situation in Low and his situation in High means that Keith’s epistemic position is sufficient to know in the former but not in the latter.

However, subject-sensitive invariantism does not explain the Low-High pair discussed in section 2.1 , since Lena’s practical situation is the same with respect to both cases. Subject-sensitive invariantists appeal to strategies like those discussed in 6.1 or 6.2 to explain third-person cases like those involving Lena. Stanley, for example, proposes that, in considering whether Lena knows, Louise is actually concerned with whether Lena would know if she were in her own (i.e., Louise’s) practical situation. And by the subject-sensitive invariantist’s lights, Lena wouldn’t know if she were in Louise’s situation; according to Stanley this provides “a perfectly intuitive explanation of the intuitions” about Louise’s knowledge denial ( Stanley 2005 , 102; Fantl and McGrath 2009 , 56 suggest a similar explanation).

While subject-sensitive invariantism is a competitor to contextualism, the debate about intellectualism is orthogonal to the debate about contextualism. Anti-intellectualist contextualism is a coherent position ( Fantl and McGrath 2009 , 34–37). Nonetheless contextualists are generally intellectualists, and treat their ability to account for the sensitivity of knowledge attributions to practical concerns without rejecting intellectualism as an advantage of their view ( DeRose 2009 , 185–193).

6.4 Relativism

We can distinguish the context in which a claim is made from the context in which the claim is assessed for truth or falsity. Relativists think that a claim’s truth-value can vary with the context in which it is assessed. Applied to knowledge attributions, relativism is usually understood to be the view that a given knowledge claim may be true relative to a context of assessment with a low epistemic standard, but false relative to a context of assessment with a high epistemic standard ( Richard 2004 , MacFarlane 2005 , MacFarlane 2014 , ch. 8; Rysiew 2011b provides a helpful overview of the relationship between contextualism and relativism). Relativists can readily accommodate the data from Low-High pairs: relative to a context of assessment with a low standard, Thelma’s knowledge attribution is true and Louise’s denial is false, whereas relative to a context of assessment with a high standard, Louise’s knowledge denial is true and Thelma’s knowledge attribution false.

Given relativism, an assessor in the High context should regard the attribution made in the Low context as false, since that attribution is false relative to the high standard in her context of assessment. For this reason, relativism’s proponents claim that it outperforms contextualism on the issues concerning disagreement and retraction canvassed in section 5.3 ( MacFarlane 2005 , 219; MacFarlane 2014 , 188). As we saw in that section, however, the disagreement and retraction data do not underwrite a straightforward challenge to contextualism. But even if they do, relativism does not clearly fit those data much better. Consider Williamson’s case again. The relativist’s advantage over the contextualist is that she can respect John’s subsequent judgment that his earlier claim was false, and inconsistent with his knowledge denial. (As we saw, the contextualist can respect this judgment as well, but it takes some footwork; for the relativist John’s judgment of falsity is true simply in virtue of relativism itself.) Yet John’s attitude towards his earlier judgment is not merely that it had a false content, but that it was the result of an error. It would be natural for him to retract by saying, “I was mistaken—I shouldn’t have said that I knew.” But the relativist’s advantage over the invariantist consists in her holding that John’s initial attribution and subsequent denial exhibit “joint reflexive accuracy”: each is true as assessed from its context of utterance ( MacFarlane 2014 , 130). And John seems quite unprepared to accept that his earlier claim was true as assessed from any context. If the semantics of knowledge claims are relativistic, John seems not even to be tacitly aware that this is the case.

In a related vein, Montminy 2009b argues that the relativist must impute to ordinary speakers a kind of semantic error in their cross-contextual judgments not unlike that which contextualists are often thought by their opponents to require. MacFarlane 2014 (196–200) responds to Montminy’s argument. Stanley 2005 , ch. 7 presents a number of theoretical objections to MacFarlane’s relativism, and Cappelen and Hawthorne 2009 give a more general critique of relativism in semantics. On the other side, MacFarlane 2014 develops a wide-ranging and finely honed case for the relativist program, offering detailed responses to many criticisms and application to a number of specific bits of language, including knowledge claims. Relativism is an important emerging paradigm in philosophical semantics, and future work may reveal distinctive advantages over the more well-entrenched contextualist and invariantist alternatives.

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Buckwalter 2010 presents evidence against (T-F):

(T-F) The knowledge attributions made by speakers in Low context vignettes are intuitively true, and the corresponding knowledge attributions made by speakers in High context vignettes are intuitively false.

There, Buckwalter found that knowledge attributions made by High context speakers were likely to be regarded by experimental subjects as true. The result is replicated in Buckwalter 2014 . One might think that trouble for (T-F) is also trouble for (T-T): if subjects regard High context knowledge denials as true, shouldn’t they regard High context knowledge attributions as false? No, because of what Lewis called the ‘rule of accommodation’: that we should, so far as is possible, interpret speakers in such a way that their assertions are true ( DeRose 2011 , 88).

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• These results help contextualize why global climate change remains a relatively low priority for most Americans .
• It is often useful to contextualize the research , to situate it relative to other work in the field .
• It's fine to quote these offensive remarks but they must be contextualized.
• He does not do enough to contextualize the novel for those who've never read it.
• It is not sufficient to merely reproduce narratives without contextualizing them within a larger social and political framework .
• appertain to something
• interconnect
• interconnected
• interconnectedness
• interconnection
• intercorrelate
• relatability
• relate to someone/something

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the nuts and bolts

the practical facts about a particular thing, rather than theories or ideas about it

Sitting on the fence (Newspaper idioms)

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contextualize

Definition of contextualize

transitive verb

Examples of contextualize in a Sentence

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'contextualize.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

contextual + -ize

1934, in the meaning defined above

Dictionary Entries Near contextualize

contextualistic

contextural

Cite this Entry

“Contextualize.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/contextualize. Accessed 3 Apr. 2024.

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