Faculty

martin montminy

Martin Montminy Associate Professor
Ph.D., Montreal
Research areas: Philosophy of Language, Philosophy of Mind, Epistemology

613 Dale Hall Tower
(405) 325-6589
montminy@ou.edu
office hours

My current research concerns contextualism. Contextualism holds that the truth conditions of a sentence depend on the conversational context. Contextualist views have been appealed to in order to dissolve certain debates in philosophy. According to contextualism, the same philosophical thesis can be correctly endorsed in some contexts and correctly denied in others: it is thus pointless to seek a context-independent solution to debates about this thesis.

According to epistemic contextualism, a popular contextualist view I endorse, the truth conditions of a knowledge claim depend in part on the epistemic standards that are in place in the conversational context. The skeptic’s knowledge denial made in the skeptical context is true, since such a context involves epistemic standards that are impossible to meet. But this does not mean that our ordinary knowledge attributions are false: since low epistemic standards prevail in quotidian conversational contexts, we can truthfully claim to have knowledge in such contexts.

I also defend contextualism with respect to vagueness. According to such a view, speakers have the discretion to judge the borderline cases of a vague predicate as they wish. Such a view has two important virtues: it respects the diversity of responses borderline cases elicit from different speakers, and it allows for a plausible treatment of high-order vagueness.

Recent courses:

PHIL 1013: Introduction to Philosophy (spring 2008, spring 2009)
PHIL 3393: 20th Century Anglo-American Philosophy (fall 2007)
PHIL 3533: Language, Communication and Knowledge (fall 2008, spring 2009)
PHIL 4513/5513: Metaphysics (fall 2007)
LING/PHIL 4533/5533: Philosophy of Language (fall 2008)
PHIL 6543: Philosophy of Mind: Semantic Externalism (spring 2008)

Selected publications:

Click here for full CV (.rtf)

“Two Contextualist Fallacies,” to appear in Synthese. (.pdf)

“Contextualism, Disagreement and Communication,” to appear in Manuscrito. (.pdf)

“Context and Communication: A Defense of Intentionalism,” to appear in Journal of Pragmatics. (.pdf)

“Contextualism, Invariantism and Semantic Blindness,” to appear in Australasian Journal of Philosophy. (.pdf)

“Contextualism, Relativism and Ordinary Speakers’ Judgments,” Philosophical Studies 143, 2009, 341-356. (.pdf)

“Contextualist Resolutions of Philosophical Debates,” Metaphilosophy 39, 2008, 571-590. (.pdf)

“Cheap Knowledge and Easy Questions,” Grazer Philosophische Studien 77, 2008, 127-146. (.pdf)

“Can Contextualists Maintain Neutrality?,” Philosophers’ Imprint 8, 2008, 1-13. (.pdf)

“Supervaluationism, Validity and Necessarily Borderline Sentences,” Analysis 68, 2008, 61-67. (.pdf)

“Moral Contextualism and the Norms for Moral Conduct,” American Philosophical Quarterly 44, 2007, 1-13. (.pdf)

“Epistemic Contextualism and the Semantics-Pragmatics Distinction,” Synthese 155, 2007, 99-125. (.pdf)

“Semantic Content, Truth-Conditions and Context,” Linguistics and Philosophy 29, 2006, 1-26. (.pdf)