Abstract

Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore’s book is ultimately a defense of their self-styled Semantic Minimalism, but it’s mainly a protracted assault on semantic Contextualism, both moderate and radical. They argue at length that Moderate Contextualism leads inevitably to Radical Contextualism and at greater length that Radical Contextualism is misguided. Supposing that “[Radical Contextualism] is the logical consequence of denying Semantic Minimalism”, they think they have given an indirect argument for their version of Semantic Minimalism. But they overlook a third view, one that splits the difference between the other two. Like Contextualism it rejects Propositionalism, the conservative dogma that every indexical-free declarative sentence expresses a proposition. Unlike Contextualism, it does not invoke context to fill semantic gaps and, indeed, denies that filling those gaps is a semantic matter. Like Cappelen and Lepore’s brand of Semantic Minimalism, it rejects the very idea of pragmatic intrusion into semantic content. However, in rejecting Propositionalism, it is more radical, indeed, more minimalist than their version of Semantic Minimalism. It does not imagine that sentences that intuitively seem not to express propositions at least express “minimal propositions.” Radical Semantic Minimalism, or simply Radicalism, says that the sentences in question are semantically incomplete—their semantic contents are not propositions but merely “propositional radicals.”