Towards an objective notion of context

Let us consider the first step that has to be made in order to develop such a general normative framework. According to supporters of the pragmatic approach, as seen above,

of the cognitive assumptions that are activated in the minds of the speaker and her audience in order to make

the evaluation of the correctness of a response to a given reasoning task should be always relativized to the subjects’ interpretation of the experimenters’ intentions. As I understand their proposal, the reasoner’s cognitive context plays a fundamental role because the context is regarded as the set of possible assumptions that the reasoner supposes herself to share with the experimenter. But, if the context of evaluation corresponds to the cognitive situation of the reasoner, the appropriateness of a given reasoning performance would demand of the reasoner too little: it would demand of her that she behaves in accordance with her own interpretation of the situation but not that her understanding of the task displays a correct grasp of the situation. In my view, what is needed is something that is external to the reasoner’s cognitive context and independent of her cognitive situation in order to assess the legitimacy of her problem reconstruction, and I identify this “something”

with the situational context by conceiving it as “objective”. The idea that the context of evaluation has to be regarded as objective has been held by few philosophers. Indeed, it is a controversial question whether we can delimit objective context completely. According to Carlo Penco, for example, if we are really interested in using an objective notion of context, we should integrate it into a cognitive one. He holds that

the objective context is, most of the times, the context we recognize as objective.

We know both that there is some objective reality and that we might get it wrong.

To describe an objective context as such, independent of a cognitive one, is therefore a risky enterprise. Any attempt to define it in an absolute way is misleading, because it takes a description – given always inside some theory or cognitive context – as an objective unrevisable description. Objectivity is always a result of our interaction, not a datum […]. (Penco 1999: 280)

I admit that identifying the context of a conversational event in an absolutely objective way is a risky (or maybe an impossible) enterprise. However, objective context may be

characterized without requiring such an absolute point of view. Most prominently, as pointed out by Marina Sbisà, the idea that the context of evaluation should be regarded as objective plays a fundamental role in the evaluation of speech acts, as originally characterized by John L. Austin (Austin 1975; Sbisà 2002). Without entering into the details of speech act theory, I focus on the role that Austin attributes to the situational context in the evaluation of an assertion as true or false.² According to Austin (1975: 143), although an assertion such as “France is hexagonal” is usually considered to be perfectly determinate, it cannot be said to be true or false until the interlocutors’ goals are specified, which usually happens tacitly. As a consequence, in order to qualify an assertion as true or false, the context in which it has been made, as well as the interlocutors’ goals, has to be taken into account. So, the assertion “France is hexagonal” may be judged true if made in a certain context with a certain goal (i.e., a general considering the sides from which his army could invade France), but may be judged false if made in another context with a different goal (i.e., a geographer describing the borders of France in detail) (Austin 1975: 142; Sbisà 2002: 426). Within this framework, it is assumed that the goals of the interlocutors determine the aspects of a situation against which the truth/falsity of a speech act concerning that situational context is to be evaluated. So, the fact that the truth or falsity of a sentence may vary from context to context shows that the situatedness of the assertion (like that of any other speech act) is strictly linked with the delimitation of its context. As Marina Sbisà (2002: 427) points out,

2 It is noteworthy that, according to Austin (1975: 141-144), truth/falsity is one among many other criteria for evaluation of a speech act. In contrast with mainstream philosophy of language, he also holds that truth/falsity is often not the best choice for evaluating an assertion. However, Austin’s claims have nothing in common with Stich’s attack against truth as our main cognitive goal (for Stich’s argument see Chapter 4, Section 2.2). Austin does not hold, as Stich does, that there is not only our idiosyncratic concept of truth, but many others, and which is the best one to rely on depends on its effectiveness to achieve things we

if a speech act is produced and understood in a context and is therefore a situated event, it seems reasonable to think that it should be evaluated with respect to that context. Consequently, in order to yield a definite evaluation of a speech act (in terms of felicity/infelicity, appropriateness/inappropriateness, truth/falsity), context must itself be delimited [...].

Three interesting lessons can be drawn from Austin’s view of speech acts: (i) every speech act, being produced and understood in a context, is a situated event; (ii) its context of evaluation corresponds to neither the participants’ cognitive contexts nor the contextual assumptions that they suppose to share with one another; rather, it depends on the context in which the interlocutors are situated; (iii) the delimitation of the context of evaluation is determined by the interlocutors’ goals. In my view, the kind of normative framework Austin proposes for the evaluation of an assertion as true or false has interesting implications for the development of a context-sensitive approach to rationality assessment.