View article

The context-sensitivity of cognition has been demonstrated across a wide range of cognitive functions such as perception, memory, judgement and decision making. A related term, ‘contextuality’, has appeared from the field of quantum cognition, with mounting empirical evidence demonstrating that cognitive phenomena are sometimes contextual. Contextuality is a subtle notion that influences how we must view the properties of the cognitive phenomenon being studied. This article addresses the questions: What does it mean for a cognitive phenomenon to be contextual? What are the implications of contextuality for probabilistic models of cognition? How does contextuality differ from context-sensitivity? Starting from George Boole’s “conditions of possible experience”, we argue that a probabilistic model of a cognitive phenomenon is necessarily subject to an assumption of realism. By this we mean that the …