Contextualism is not a Comfort Blanket
This post concerns the strategy of postulating contextual variability to resolve/dissolve an apparent philosophical dispute. Sometimes, it seems to me, philosophers feel methodologically aggrieved when they encounter instances of this strategy. I’m going to list some of the criticisms I’ve heard from (or thought up on behalf of) the aggrieved parties, and explain why I think they’re bad criticisms of the contextualist strategy.
(1) ‘It’s too easy.’
Why assume that good philosophy should be hard? Assuming we’re interested in getting at the truth, rather than proving that we can do difficult things, easiness is irrelevant. To put it another way, if difficulty is a theoretical virtue at all, I know of no reason to think it is a virtue of the kind that is relevant to rational belief.
Also, it’s far from clear that it is easy. There are, for example, many serious and important objections to epistemic contextualism which the epistemic contexualist needs to engage with in order to sustain her position.
(2) ‘It’s too broadly applicable.’
Why assume that philosophical strategies should not be broadly applicable? In some arenas, features such as generality and breadth of explantory power are regarded as theoretical virtues, and moreover virtues of the kind relevant to rational belief.
Perhaps the concern is supposed to be that, given the breadth of applicability, it is difficult or impossible to place constraints on when the strategy is appropriate. But I see no reason to suppose that breadth of applicability is directly relevant to the issue of how to find and justify such constraints. Any strategy that is (or even might be) appropriate in some but not all of the debates in which it is applicable raises the methodological question of what constraints to place on its appropriate application.
(3) ‘It’s lazy.’
It could be argued that reaching for the contextualist strategy, like reaching for one’s comfort blanket, enables philosophers to avoid doing the hard work of evaluating other strategies and making a proper assessment of their merits relative to those of the contextualist strategy.
But this is not a criticism of the strategy; it’s a criticism of a particular way of abusing the ready availability of the strategy. Of course no defender of widespread contextual variability should forget to consider other options and assess their pros and cons. But the same goes for every philosopher who has a view to defend.
I agree with you that none of these are reasons to resist contextualist solutions to things. But I’m not sure I’ve encountered them being put to that use. Who says things like these?
Why assume that good philosophy should be hard? Assuming we’re interested in getting at the truth, rather than proving that we can do difficult things, easiness is irrelevant.
Complaining that ‘it’s too easy’ surely isn’t to assume that all good philosophy is hard. It’s to make some comparative claim such as the solution is improbably simple given the difficulty of the problem. That’s consistent with the view that (good) philosophy is not in principle hard, and the view that hard problems sometimes have easy solutions.
I thought Jason’s point was that contextualism was a comfort blanket if it’s introduced to solve a philosophical problem without showing that it’s special features of that problem that make it amenable to that kind of solution, and in particular, without redeeming the hostages one holds out in the philosophy of language. So it’s a certain kind of uncritical application of one of these methodologies that he’s against.