The book aims to pick up the logical analysis of language, as Russell conceived of it in his Principles of Mathematics, by bringing out the structural components of context-sensitivity and their fundamental, if not primitive, mathematical counterparts. Chapter 1 offers an overview of the literature and challenges the uncritical “context-unit assumption” that the semantic content of every context-sensitive expression depends on one context at a time. It then argues that any semantic content of any utterance comes from some prior content, by transposition from some context of reference to the current context. Thus, the content of the utterance depends primarily on the context-shift from which the context of utterance originates. Moreover, the linguistic meaning of an expression is understood as built up by transposition and collation of more specific contents. The ensuing picture is shown both to cover the full spread of context-sensitivity without giving up the prospect of its formal representation and to account for the connection between meaning and content without sacrificing one for the other.

Chapter 6, Thinking Persons, begins with a review of how thinking has been conceptualized throughout history. We then present two contemporary ideas of how to think about thinking. According to the first idea, thinking is a wholly internal activity that takes place in the brain. The brain is seen as a computational and representational system, in analogy to digital computers. Connected to this view are debates about how thoughts and other mental activities and properties can be represented in people’s minds or brains. According to the second idea, thinking takes place in an interactive and dynamic system that includes the individual’s body and surroundings. The two ideas are based in different definitions of “thinking.” Internalism sees it as something that could only occur inside a person’s brain. Contextualism sees it as something that may include tools, other people, and other things outside the person. The chapter ends with a comparison of how these ideas about thinking fit with a view of human beings as socially contextualized persons.

An introduction to attachment theory while completing an undergraduate degree in South Africa opened an opportunity to study at Johns Hopkins University with the recognized mother of attachment theory, Mary Ainsworth. My tenure with her was intensive but short, as she decided to leave Hopkins for Virginia, leading me to head further north to Yale, though not until Ainsworth had introduced me to both Melvin Konner (a distinguished anthropologist) and Urie Bronfenbrenner, a doyen of developmental psychology then determined to radically transform stuffy developmental psychology into a contextually sensitive sub-discipline. With Ainsworth and Bronfenbrenner as off-site mentors, William Kessen introduced sophisticated developmental theory while Edward Zigler expounded the importance of using research to inform social policy in pursuit of a better world for children.

Relatively few works of ancient literature survive intact. Many more are known only as fragments or through the testimony of other authors. How should literary history acknowledge the fact and the consequences of such extensive loss? This chapter reviews the difficulties in identifying and presenting the evidence for lost works, explores what (besides their hypothetical reconstruction) can be learned from their remains, and considers how accommodation of the lost and the fragmentary challenges historians of literature to rethink the objectives and the methods of their enterprise.

This chapter starts by framing the larger debate concerning universalism versus contextualism in ethics, largely mirroring the one between positivism and relativism in science. It proposes that pragmatism transcends this dichotomy by considering the role of general (and particular) ethical norms and values in context and by focusing on moral deliberation. The pragmatist approach to ethics is described before discussing the ways in which ethical concerns and forms of reasoning accompany every phase of a research project. The practice of using deception, which is both widespread and controversial in social and psychological research, is reflected upon. Finally, the chapter ends with considerations regarding mixed methods, multi-resolution designs, and their ethical commitments.

This chapter introduces the book and its inspiration, mission, central research questions and structure. It links the effectiveness of corporate social responsibility (CSR) to better understanding of its interdependent relationship with law, regulation and governance. The chapter shows that the book is unconstrained by conventional understandings and the neo-liberal voluntarism orthodoxy of some disciplines in suggesting opportunities for tackling substantive and procedural barriers for CSR in public international law, private international law and national law. It underlines the need for contextualism and a spectrum for possible legal and regulatory intermediation in fifteen ingredients of CSR.

This chapter underlines the need for contextualism in showing that small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are more suited than multinational enterprises for wider corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities and impacts in developing and emerging markets. While highlighting institutional conditions for enabling socially responsible practices by firms, it is argued that an appropriate regulatory environment is necessary to enhance the potential of SMEs.

The chapter considers the concept of regulation and a range of regulatory and non-regulatory options, including market and non-market mechanisms that governments have used and can use to advance corporate social responsibility (CSR). It recommends a six-step model for developing a CSR policy framework for governments of developing and emerging countries. The chapter therefore reiterates a more nuanced approach to regulation of CSR than the voluntarism orthodoxy acknowledges.

This chapter argues that ‘stakeholder needs’ and the ‘value system paradigm’ are alternative approaches to regulating corporate social responsibility (CSR). Drawing on Pound’s Theory of Social Interests and the institutional and stakeholder theories, it highlights the importance of contextualism in CSR and demonstrates that a values system paradigm may be a more suitable regulatory strategy, particularly in the developing and emerging markets. The chapter suggests that the stakeholder needs approach should be coupled with a values system paradigm for a more effective CSR when stakeholder responsiveness is desired.

Stage 7 of the journey moves to utterance meaning and to various ways of explaining how speakers communicate more than what the sentence says. It introduces the intention-and-inference-based concept of meaning in Grice’s and post-Gricean pragmatics, travelling though maxims, principles, and heuristics proposed by various scholars of this orientation. It then moves to introducing (i) approaches that advocate the ‘maximalist’, contextualist semantic content and (ii) semantic minimalism that preserves a much clearer boundary between semantics and pragmatics – suggesting ‘food for thought’ at many points in the discussion.