It is common in philosophy of language to recognise two different kinds of linguistic meaning: literal or conventional meaning, on the one hand, versus communicated or conveyed meaning, on the other. However, once we recognise these two types of meaning, crucial questions immediately emerge; for instance, exactly which meanings should we treat as the literal (semantic) ones, and exactly which appeals to a context of utterance yield communicated (pragmatic), as opposed to semantic, content? It is these questions and, (...) specifically, how we should model the relationship between semantic content and utterance context, that is the topic of this chapter. We explore five contemporary answers to this modelling question, considering the benefits and challenges of each, before closing by examining some potential new directions for debates in this area. (shrink)

It is common in philosophy of language to recognise two different kinds of linguistic meaning: literal or conventional meaning, on the one hand, versus communicated or conveyed meaning, on the other. However, once we recognise these two types of meaning, crucial questions immediately emerge; for instance, exactly which meanings should we treat as the literal (semantic) ones, and exactly which appeals to a context of utterance yield communicated (pragmatic), as opposed to semantic, content? It is these questions and, (...) specifically, how we should model the relationship between semantic content and utterance context, that is the topic of this chapter. We explore five contemporary answers to this modelling question, considering the benefits and challenges of each, before closing by examining some potential new directions for debates in this area. (shrink)

It is common in philosophy of language to recognise two different kinds of linguistic meaning: literal or conventional meaning, on the one hand, versus communicated or conveyed meaning, on the other. However, once we recognise these two types of meaning, crucial questions immediately emerge; for instance, exactly which meanings should we treat as the literal (semantic) ones, and exactly which appeals to a context of utterance yield communicated (pragmatic), as opposed to semantic, content? It is these questions and, (...) specifically, how we should model the relationship between semantic content and utterance context, that is the topic of this chapter. We explore five contemporary answers to this modelling question, considering the benefits and challenges of each, before closing by examining some potential new directions for debates in this area. (shrink)

Based on the analysis of narrations in Free Indirect Discourse and the Historical Present, we argue that the grammatical notion of context of speech should be ramified into a Context of Thought and a Context of Utterance. Tense and person depend on the Context of Utterance, while all other indexicals are evaluated with respect to the Context of Thought. Free Indirect Discourse and the Historical Present are analyzed as special combinatorial possibilities that arise (...) when the two contexts are distinct, and exactly one of them is presented as identical to the physical point at which the sentence is articulated. (shrink)

This meta-study of animal semantics is anchored in two claims, seemingly creating a fuzzy mismatch, that animal utterances generally appear to be simple in structure and content variation and that animals’ communicative understanding seems disproportionally more advanced. A set of excerpted, new studies is chosen as basis to discuss whether the semantics of animal uttering and understanding can be fused into one. Studies are prioritised due to their relatively complex designs, giving priority to dynamics between syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and between (...) utterers and receivers in context. A communicational framework based on utterance theory is applied as a lens for inspection of how these aspects relate to the assumed mismatch. Inspection and discussions of the studies bring several features to surface of which five are stressed in the following. Firstly, both syntactic structures and possible semantic content are seen as lean, although richer than earlier believed, and research continues to reveal new complexities in utterances. Secondly, there is a clear willingness to broaden the perception of animals’ semantic capacity to comprehend communication both by arguing theoretically and by generating empirical research in new contexts. Thirdly, the ambition to make sense of these tendencies is still often motivated by an evolutionary search for early building blocks for verbal language, with the pro et cons that such a position can have. Fourthly, the ‘allowed’ scientific frame for studying semantic capacity among animals is extended to new fields and contexts challenging the only-in-the-wild norm. Fifthly, the dilemma of integrating uttering and understanding as aspects of an after all functional communicational system, calls for new epistemological concepts to make sense of the claimed mismatch. Affordances, abduction, life-genre, and lifeworld are suggested. (shrink)

In this paper I expose and criticise the distinction between pure indexicals and demonstratives, held by David Kaplan and John Perry. I oppose the context of material production of the utterance to the “intended context” (the context of interpretation, i.e. the context the speaker indicates as semantically relevant): this opposition introduces an intentional feature into the interpretation of pure indexicals. As far as the indexical I is concerned, I maintain that we must distinguish between the (...) material producer of the utterance containing I and the “intended agent of the context” - i.e. the individual designated by the material producer as the responsible for the utterance. (shrink)

In this paper I will examine the relation between the theory of obligations and its use in sophismatic contexts through the lens of certain pragmatic concerns. In order to do this, I will take a sophism discussed by Peter of Mantua in his treatise on obligations as a case-study. I will first provide a brief outline of the structure of the treatise and then examine a concrete case that shows how the relationship between background assumptions (casus and context of (...) utterance) and criteria of response seems to suggest a way to qualify the application of general rules (especially for irrelevant sentences) in certain limit-cases. By discussing Peter's presentation of the sophism, I will also argue for a connection between Peter of Mantua's text and Mesino de Codronchi's Questiones on the De Interpretatione. (shrink)

Ruffino-Marco_Deferred-utterances-and-proper-contexts.

For many purposes in pragmatics one needs to appeal to a context of utterance conceived as a set of sentences or propositions. The context of utterance in this sense is often defined as the set of assumptions that the speaker supposes he or she shares with the hearer. I argue by stages that this is a mistake. First, if contexts must be defined in terms of shared assumptions, then it would be preferable to define the (...) class='Hi'>context as the set of assumptionsthat the interlocutors really do share. Second, not all shared assumptions belong to the context, because not all are relevant. Third, hearers need not accept every member of the context, because some presuppositions are informative. Finally, presupposition coordination problems show that contexts may have contents that even the speaker does not accept. Contexts, we may conclude, are mind-transcendent. In one sense of the term a "presupposition" is an interlocutor's take on this mind-transcendent context. (shrink)

Formal pragmatics plays an important, though secondary, role in modern analytical philosophy of language: its aim is to explain how context can affect the meaning of certain special kinds of utterances. During recent years, the adequacy of formal tools has come under attack, often leading to one or another form of relativism or antirealism.1 Our aim will be to extend the critique to formal pragmatics while showing that sceptical conclusions can be avoided by developing a different approach to the (...) issues. In particular, we will show that formal pragmatics cannot provide a complete account of how context affects the meaning of utterances, both on its own terms and when faced with evidence of important aspects of natural languages. The focal issue is the relevant kind of context in which pragmatics should examine utterances. Our contention will be that the relevant context of an utterance is determined by the function of that utterance, this function being dependent upon the primary function of language – to convey information. We will argue that the functions of utterances and of language are too broad to be caught by the tools of formal pragmatics of the sort advocated by Montague (1968, 1974), which are an extension the methods of traditional model-theoretic semantics.2 The particular formal approach we will use as the main example is David Kaplan’s position (1979, 1989),3 an extension of Montague’s program. (shrink)

We use the interpretation of vague scalar predicates like small as an illustration of how systematic semantic models of dialogue context enable the derivation of useful, fine-grained utterance interpretations from radically underspeci- fied semantic forms. Because dialogue context suffices to determine salient alternative scales and relevant distinctions along these scales, we can infer implicit standards of comparison for vague scalar predicates through completely general pragmatics, yet closely constrain the intended meaning to within a natural range.

Formal pragmatics plays an important, though secondary, role in modern analytical philosophy of language: its aim is to explain how context can affect the meaning of certain special kinds of utterances. During recent years, the adequacy of formal tools has come under attack, often leading to one or another form of relativism or antirealism. Our aim will be to extend the critique to formal pragmatics while showing that sceptical conclusions can be avoided by developing a different approach to the (...) issues. In particular, we will show that formal pragmatics cannot provide a complete account of how context affects the meaning of utterances, both on its own terms and when faced with evidence of important aspects of natural languages. The focal issue is the relevant kind of context in which pragmatics should examine utterances. Our contention will be that the relevant context of an utterance is determined by the function of that utterance, this function being dependent upon the primary function of language – to convey information. We will argue that the functions of utterances and of language are too broad to be caught by the tools of formal pragmatics of the sort advocated by Montague (1968, 1974), which are an extension the methods of traditional model-theoretic semantics. The particular formal approach we will use as the main example is David Kaplan’s position (1979, 1989), an extension of Montague’s program. (shrink)

Natural languages are riddled with context-sensitivity. One and the same string of words can express many different meanings on occasion of use, and yet we understand one another effortlessly, on the fly. How do we do so? What fixes the meaning of context-sensitive expressions, and how are we able to recover the meaning so effortlessly? -/- This book offers a novel response: we can do so because we draw on a broad array of subtle linguistic conventions that determine (...) the interpretation of context-sensitive items. Contrary to the dominant tradition, which maintains that the meaning of context-sensitive language is underspecified by grammar and that interpretation relies on non-linguistic cues and speakers' intentions, this book argues that meaning is determined entirely by discourse conventions, rules of language that have largely been missed and the effects of which have been mistaken for extra-linguistic effects of an utterance situation on meaning. The linguistic account of context developed here sheds new light on the nature of linguistic content and the interaction between content and context. At the same time, it provides a novel model of context that should constrain and help evaluate debates across many subfields of philosophy where appeal to context has been common, often leading to surprising conclusions such as epistemology, ethics, value theory, metaphysics, metaethics, and logic. (shrink)

I propose an apparatus for handling intrasentential change in context. The standard approach has problems with sentences with multiple occurrences of the same demonstrative or indexical. My proposal involves the idea that contexts can be complex. Complex contexts are built out of (“simple”) Kaplanian contexts by ordered n-tupling. With these we can revise the clauses of Kaplan’s Logic of Demonstratives so that each part of a sentence is taken in a different component of a complex context. I consider (...) other applications of the framework: to agentially distributed utterances (ones made partly by one speaker and partly by another); to an account of scare-quoting; and to an account of a binding-like phenomenon that avoids what Kit Fine calls “the antinomy of the variable.”. (shrink)

I argue that some utterances of sentences containing occurrences of indexical expressions should not be evaluated with respect to the context of utterance. I suggest that we distinguish between context of utterance and context of interpret‐ation, and I employ this distinction in the analysis of recorded messages and other interesting linguistic phenomena. I then discuss the implications of my views on contexts with respect to the logic of indexicals. Against the traditional view, I argue that (...) sentences such as ‘I am here now’ or ‘something exists’ should not be treated as logical truths. (shrink)

In recent years, some people have held that a radical relativist position is defensible in some philosophically interesting cases, including future contingents, predicates of personal taste, evaluative predicates in general, epistemic modals, and knowledge attributions. The position is frequently characterized as denying that utterance-truth is absolute. I argue that this characterization is inappropriate, as it requires a metaphysical substantive contention with which moderate views as such need not be committed. Before this, I also offer a more basic, admittedly less (...) exciting alternative characterization of the position, in terms of departing from the Kaplan–Lewis–Stalnaker two-dimensional framework. (shrink)

Nonindexical Context-Dependence and the Interpretation as Abduction Approach Inclusive nonindexical context-dependence occurs when the preferred interpretation of an utterance implies its lexically-derived meaning. It is argued that the corresponding processes of free or lexically mandated enrichment can be modeled as abductive inference. A form of abduction is implemented in Simple Type Theory on the basis of a notion of plausibility, which is in turn regarded a preference relation over possible worlds. Since a preordering of doxastic alternatives taken (...) for itself only amounts to a relatively vacuous ad hoc model, it needs to be combined with a rational way of learning from new evidence. Lexicographic upgrade is implemented as an example of how an agent might revise his plausibility ordering in light of new evidence. Various examples are given how this apparatus may be used to model the contextual resolution of context-dependent or semantically incomplete utterances. The described form of abduction is limited and merely serves as a proof of concept, but the idea in general has good potential as one among many ways to build a bridge between semantics and pragmatics since inclusive context-dependence is ubiquitous. (shrink)

Utterances in situated activity are about the world. Theories and systems normally capture this by assuming references must be resolved to real-world entities in utterance understanding. We describe a number of puzzles and problems for this approach, and propose an alternative semantic representation using discourse relations that link utterances to the nonlinguistic context to capture the context-dependent interpretation of situated utterances. Our approach promises better empirical coverage and more straightforward system building. Substantiating these advantages is work in (...) progress. (shrink)

Una Stojnić urges the radical view that the meaning of context-sensitive language is not “partially determined by non-linguistic features of utterance situation”, as traditionally thought, but rather “is determined entirely by grammar—by rules of language that have largely been missed”. The missed rules are ones of discourse coherence. The paper argues against this radical view as it applies to demonstrations, demonstratives, and the indexical ‘I’. Stojnić’s theories of demon-strations and demonstratives are found to be seriously incomplete, failing to (...) meet the demands on any theory of reference. Furthermore, the paper argues that, so far as Stojnić’s theories of these terms go, they are false. This argument appeals to perception-based theories of demonstratives, a part of the tradition that Stojnić strangely overlooks. The paper ends by arguing briefly that though coherence has a place in a theory of understanding, it has no place in a theory of meaning. (shrink)

In this paper I defend Kaplan’s claim that the sentence “I am here now” is logically true. A number of counter-examples to the claim have been proposed, including occurrences of the sentence in answerphone messages, written notes left for later decoding, etc. These counter-examples are only convincing if they can be shown to be cases where the correct context with respect to which the utterance should be evaluated is the context in which it is decoded rather than (...) encoded. I argue that this is not the case, and draw on the distinction between force and content to suggest an alternative account of how information is communicated in these cases that is consistent with Kaplan’s semantic theory. (shrink)

Speakers often use ordinary words and phrases, unembedded in any sentence, to perform speech acts—or so it appears. In some cases appearances are deceptive: The seemingly lexical/phrasal utterance may really be an utterance of a syntactically eplliptical sentence. I argue however that, at least sometimes, plain old words and phrases are used on their own. The use of both words/phrases and elliptical sentences leads to two consequences: 1. Context must contribute more to utterance meaning than is (...) often supposed. Here's why: The semantic type of normal words and phrases is non-proppositional, even after the usual contextual features are added . Yet an utterance of a word/phrase can be fully propositional. 2. Often, a hearer does not need to know the exact identity of the expression uttered, to understand an utterance. The reason: Typically, words/phrases in context will sound the same, and mean the same, as some elliptical sentence token. (shrink)

Human communication is multi-modal. It is an empirical fact that many of our acts of communication exploit a variety of means to make our communicative intentions recognisable. Scholars readily distinguish between verbal and non-verbal means of communication, and very often they deal with them separately. So it is that a great number of semanticists and pragmaticists give verbal communication preferential treatment. The non-verbal aspects of an act of communication are treated as if they were not underlain by communicative intentions. They (...) are “relegated” to mere aspects of the context. However, several schools of thoughts have a different take on the issue. Thus psychologists or semioticians of gesture have shown how intricately gestures and speech are related in utterances. And, in a different area of the theoretical landscape, so-called “Relevance Theorists” have made the same point. Thus, Robyn Carston writes that “the domain of pragmatics is a natural class of environmental phenomena, that of ostensive stimuli; verbal utterances are the central case, but not the only one, and they themselves are frequently accompanied by other ostensive gestures of the face, hands, voice etc, all of which have to be interpreted together if one is to correctly infer what is being communicated”. This position rests on the assumption that there is a single “pragmatic system” or module at work in the interpretation of “ostensive stimuli”. When it comes to interpreting verbal stimuli, the same mechanisms and resources are used as when it comes to processing non-verbal ones. If there is no distinct “linguistic pragmatic system”, then the scholar who studies communication should not favour the verbal at the expense of the non-verbal. In this paper, I want to make a contribution to the study of multi-modal messages by considering a type of utterances that mix the verbal with the non-verbal in such a way that a piece of non-linguistic communication seems to stand in for a linguistic constituent which remains unrealised. Here is a real-life example : I didn't see the [IMITATION OF FRIGHTENING GRUMPINESS] woman today; will she be back this week? The square-bracketed string in small capitals is meant to capture the facial expressions and gestures performed in the conversational setting. What is intriguing here is that this instance of ostensive mimicry does not come as a mere complement to some linguistic stimulus; it appears to take the place of that stimulus. I shall try to show that a linguistic analysis can indeed be offered for cases like – though, I believe, without succumbing to the pro-linguistic bias that Carston warns against. I will, however, argue against an ellipsis-based account : the structure of sentence does not contain an unrealised adjective phrase. Instead, I shall defend a ‘syntactic-recruitment' account. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 46, Issue 7, July 2022.

Moore supposedly discovered that there are sentences of a certain form that, though they can be true, no rational human being can sincerely and truly utter any of them. MC and MO are particular instances:MC: “It is raining and I believe that it is not raining”MO: “It is raining and I don’t believe that it is raining”In this paper, I show that there are sentences of the same form as MC and MO that can be sincerely and truly uttered by (...) rational agents. We call sentences of the same form as MC and MO “Moorean Sentences”. In Part II, we go over a standard argument for why sentences of the same form as MC and MO cannot be sincerely and truly uttered, and we explain why this argument is unsound. In explaining why this argument is unsound, we rely on the context-sensitivity of belief-reports and show that the premises of the argument are not all true in the same context. We then employ a general theory of belief reports that incorporates guises to explain why our examples are sincerely utterable while Moore’s sentences are typically not sincerely utterable. The answer will turn on the suggestion that belief reports carry a hidden quantifier over guises, where the domain of quantification is determined by context. We conclude with general lessons about Moore’s Paradox and the supposed limits of first-person belief reports. (shrink)

We distinguish, among other things, between the agent of the context, the speaker of the agent's utterance, the mechanism the agent uses to produce her utterance, and the tokening of the sentence uttered. Armed with these distinctions, we tackle the the ‘answer-machine’, ‘post-it note’ and other allegedly problematic cases, arguing that they can be handled without departing significantly from Kaplan's semantical framework for indexicals. In particular, we argue that these cases don't require adopting Stefano Predelli's intentionalism.

The popular interpretation of token‐reflexivism states that at the level of logical form, indexicals and demonstratives are disguised descriptions that employ complex demonstratives or special quotation‐mark names involving particular tokens of the appropriate expression‐types. In this article I first demonstrate that this interpretation of token‐reflexivism is only one of many, and that it is better to think of token‐reflexivism as denoting a family of distinct theoretical frameworks. Second, I contrast two interpretations of the idea of the token‐reflexive paraphrase of an (...) indexical sentence. The utterance approach claims that token‐reflexive paraphrases involve tokens of entire utterances. The sub‐utterance approach maintains that token‐reflexive paraphrases involve tokens of the particular indexical words used in the utterance. Next, I pose a problem that shows that neither of the two approaches is correct. The problem shows that the only viable version of the token‐reflexive proposition must somehow take into account the referential intentions of the speaker of the context. Therefore I conclude the article by sketching the framework of restricted intentional token‐reflexivism. I argue that it is an attractive semantic theory of distributed utterances that, among other things, enables automatic and intentional indexicals to be distinguished. (shrink)

The cognitive basis of utterance interpretation is an area that continues to provoke intense theoretical debate among pragmatists. That utterance interpretation involves some type of mind-reading or theory of mind (ToM) is indisputable. However, theorists are divided on the exact nature of this ToM-based mechanism. In this paper, it is argued that the only type of ToM-based mechanism that can adequately represent the cognitive basis of utterance interpretation is one which reflects the rational, intentional, holistic character of (...) interpretation. Such a ToM-based mechanism is supported on conceptual and empirical grounds. Empirical support for this view derives from the study of children and adults with pragmatic disorders. Specifically, three types of clinical case are considered. In the first case, evidence is advanced which indicates that individuals with pragmatic disorders exhibit deficits in reasoning and the use of inferences. These deficits compromise the ability of children and adults with pragmatic disorders to comply with the rational dimension of utterance interpretation. In the second case, evidence is presented which suggests that subjects with pragmatic disorders struggle with the intentional dimension of utterance interpretation. This dimension extends beyond the recognition of communicative intentions to include the attribution of a range of cognitive and affective mental states that play a role in utterance interpretation. In the third case, evidence is presented that children and adults with pragmatic disorders struggle with the holistic character of utterance interpretation. This serves to distort the contexts in which utterances are processed for their implicated meanings. The paper concludes with some thoughts about the role of theorizing in relation to utterance interpretation. (shrink)

With mention of Ogden and Richards' The Meaning of Meaning, and drawing on Mailinowski, for an opening example, Dewey argues for the importance of the relationship of interpretation and meaning, to context and and situation of usage or utterance. In this article, Dewey expounds, among other themes, on the the prospect of interpretation of a radically alien language and what this prospect tells us about linguistic meaning.

This paper defends the claim that although ‘Superman is Clark Kent and some people who believe that Superman flies do not believe that Clark Kent flies’ is a logically inconsistent sentence, we can still utter this sentence, while speaking literally, without asserting anything false. The key idea is that the context-sensitivity of attitude reports can be - and often is - resolved in different ways within a single sentence.

In this paper, I defend the thesis that alleffects of extra-linguistic context on thetruth-conditions of an assertion are traceable toelements in the actual syntactic structure of thesentence uttered. In the first section, I develop thethesis in detail, and discuss its implications for therelation between semantics and pragmatics. The nexttwo sections are devoted to apparent counterexamples.In the second section, I argue that there are noconvincing examples of true non-sentential assertions.In the third section, I argue that there are noconvincing examples of (...) what John Perry has called`unarticulated constituents''. I conclude by drawingsome consequences of my arguments for appeals tocontext-dependence in the resolution of problems inepistemology and philosophical logic. (shrink)

This paper argues that truth values of sentences containing predicates of “personal taste” such as fun or tasty must be relativized to individuals. This relativization is of truth value only, and does not involve a relativization of semantic content: If you say roller coasters are fun, and I say they are not, I am negating the same content which you assert, and directly contradicting you. Nonetheless, both our utterances can be true (relative to their separate contexts). A formal semantic theory (...) is presented which gives this result by introducing an individual index, analogous to the world and time indices commonly used, and by treating the pragmatic context as supplying a particular value for this index. The context supplies this value in the derivation of truth values from content, not in the derivation of content from character. Predicates of personal taste therefore display a kind of contextual variation in interpretation which is unlike the familiar variation exhibited by pronouns and other indexicals. (shrink)

Sensitivity to the extra-linguistic context, as exhibited by indexical and demonstrative expressions, and sensitivity to the linguistic context, as exhibited by, for example, anaphoric uses of third person pronouns, are regularly regarded as different and independent phenomena. The data on indexicals, demonstratives, and third person pronouns, however, call for a more unified notion of context and of context sensitivity. This paper aims to develop such a unified picture by generalizing the notion of anaphora to encompass extra-linguistic (...) context dependency and generalizing the notion of a structured discourse context so that contexts contain antecedents for expressions that refer to entities in the extra-linguistic context. (shrink)

Context Shifting Arguments (CSA) ask us to consider two utterances of an unambiguous, non-vague, non-elliptic sentence S. If the consensus intuition is that what’s said, or expressed or the truth-conditions, and so possibly the truthvalues, of these utterances differ, then CSA concludes S is context sensitive. Consider, for example, simultaneous utterances of ‘I am wearing a hat’, one by Stephen, one by Jason. Intuitively, these utterances can vary in truth-value contingent upon who is speaking the sentence, while holding (...) hat-wearing constant, and so they express distinct propositions and differ in their truth conditions. Since these differences are not the result of ambiguity (lexical or structural), vagueness, conversational implicature, or syntactic ellipsis, we have pretty strong evidence that ‘I am wearing a hat’ is context sensitive. (shrink)

Linguistic expressions frequently make reference to the situation in which they are uttered. In fact, there are expressions whose whole point of use is to relate to their context of utterance. It is such expressions that this article is primarily about. However, rather than presenting the richness of pertinent phenomena (cf. Anderson & Keenan 1985), it concentrates on the theoretical tools provided by the (standard) two-dimensional analysis of context dependence, essentially originating with Kaplan (1989)--with a little help (...) from Stalnaker (1978) and Lewis (1979a, 1980), and various predecessors including Kamp (1971) and Vlach (1973). The current article overlaps in content with the account in Zimmermann (1991), which is however much broader (and at times deeper).. (shrink)

On a traditional view, the semantics of natural language makes essential use of a context parameter, i.e. a set of coordinates that represents the situation of speech. In classical semantic frameworks, this parameter plays two key roles: first, context contributes to determining the content of utterance; second, it is crucial for defining logical consequence. I point out that recent empirical proposals about context shift in natural language (in particular, context-shifting semantics in the style of Anand (...) and Nevins 2004) are incompatible with the traditional view of context. At the same time, there is increasing cross-linguistic support for this brand of context shift. Hence I suggest that context has no place in semantic theory proper. We should revert back to so-called multiple-indexing frameworks that were developed by Montague and others, and relegate context to the postsemantic stage. (shrink)

It is commonly held that the context with respect to which an indexical is interpreted is determined independently of the interpretation of the indexical. This view, which I call Context Realism, has explanatory significance: it is because the context is what it is that an indexical refers to what it does. In this paper, I provide an argument against Context Realism. I then develop an alternative that I call Context Constructivism, according to which indexicals are (...) defined not in terms of features of utterance situations, but rather in terms of roles that objects could play. (shrink)

Recently, philosophers have offered compelling reasons to think that demonstratives are best represented as variables, sensitive not to the context of utterance, but to a variable assignment. Variablists typically explain familiar intuitions about demonstratives—intuitions that suggest that what is said by way of a demonstrative sentence varies systematically over contexts—by claiming that contexts initialize a particular assignment of values to variables. I argue that we do not need to link context and the assignment parameter in this way, (...) and that we would do better not to. (shrink)

In his seminal paper 'Assertion', Robert Stalnaker distinguishes between the semantic content of a sentence on an occasion of use and the content asserted by an utterance of that sentence on that occasion. While in general the assertoric content of an utterance is simply its semantic content, the mechanisms of conversation sometimes force the two apart. Of special interest in this connection is one of the principles governing assertoric content in the framework, one according to which the asserted (...) content ought to be identical at each world in the context set. In this paper, we present a problem for Stalnaker's meta-semantic framework, by challenging the plausibility of the Uniformity principle. We argue that the interaction of the framework with facts about epistemic accessibility - in particular, failures of epistemic transparency - cause problems for the Uniformity principle and thus for Stalnaker's framework more generally. (shrink)

In this paper, I report new empirical data on folk semantic intuitions concerning color adjectives in so-called context-shifting experiments. Contextualists present such experiments — that is, they describe different conversational contexts in which a given sentence is uttered — in order to argue that context can shape meaning and truth conditions to such a degree that competent speakers would give opposite truth evaluations of the same sentence in different contexts. The initial findings of Hansen and Chemla (2013) suggest (...) that laypersons’ semantic judgments are sensitive to context in the same way that is predicted by contextualists. In this paper, I focus on context-shifting experiments that involve color adjectives; also, I present experiments that are a partial replication and methodological extension of Hansen and Chemla’s study. One aim of my study was to corroborate these authors’ findings using a bigger sample (total N = 1128), but the main goal was to test the stability of results in different methodological variants of empirical adaptations of context-shifting experiments. This part of the study addresses the issues pointed out in my earlier paper (Ziółkowski 2017), where I argued that certain experimental settings (within-subjects) might bring data that is more favorable to contextualism than other settings (between-subjects). My study compares three different experimental settings: within-subjects (with randomized order of context presentation), between-subjects (where participants evaluating different contexts aredistinct groups), and “contrastive design” (where both contexts are presented side by side on the same screen). My results are highly consistent across the methodological variants I employed, but while they show some of the effects expected by contextualists, it is disputable whether they bring strong support to contextualism with respect to color adjectives. (shrink)

Contextualism is relativism tamed. Relativism about truth is usually motivated by the idea of no-fault disagreement. Imagine two parties: one (she) says ‘P’; the other (he) says ‘Not P’.1 Apparently, if P then ‘P’ is true and ‘Not P’ false, so she is right and he is wrong; if not P then ‘P’ is false and ‘Not P’ true, so he is right and she is wrong. In both cases, there is an asymmetry between the two parties. Since P or (...) not P (by the law of excluded middle), there is indeed an asymmetry between them, one way or the other. Yet the two parties may strike a neutral observer as on a par, equally intelligent, informed, perceptive and alert. Relativists about truth strive to dissolve the unpleasant asymmetry: ‘”P” is true for her; “Not P” is true for him’. Trouble starts when we ask what the relativists mean by ‘for’ in the construction ‘true for X’. If to call something true ‘for’ X is just to say that X believes that it is true, then the attempted dissolution amounts to this: ‘She believes that “P” is true; he believes that “Not P” is true’. But that is to add no more than that both parties believe that they are right; it does nothing to undermine the argument for an asymmetry between them. Relativists had better mean something else by ‘true for X’. When asked to explain what else they mean, wild relativists bluster incoherently. Contextualists, by contrast, have a clear answer. A sentence is true for X if and only if it is true as uttered by X, true relative to a context in which X is the speaker. Such relativism is tame because the relativity to context in the truth-value of a sentence allows for absoluteness in the truth-value of what the sentence is used to say in a given context. When she says ‘P’, she speaks truly: not just truly for her, but absolutely truly. When he says ‘Not P’, he too speaks truly: not just truly for him, but absolutely truly. The argument for asymmetry 1 assumes that, when she says ‘P’, she speaks truly if and only if P, and when he says ‘Not P’, he speaks truly if and only if not P.. (shrink)

Both context relativists and circumstance-of-evaluation relativists agree that the traditional semantic interpretation of some sentence-types fails to deliver the adequate truth-conditions for the corresponding tokens. But while the context relativists argue that the truth-conditions of each token depend on its context of utterance—each token being thus associated with a distinct intension—circumstance-of-evaluation relativists preserve a unique intension for all the tokens by placing circumstances of evaluations under the influence of a certain ‘point of view’. The main difference (...) between the two approaches is that only the former can operate locally. It is shown that, for this reason, circumstance-of-evaluation relativism makes erroneous semantic predictions about (relative) gradable adjectives. (shrink)

Context figures in the interpretation of utterances in many different ways. In the tradition of possible-worlds semantics, the seminal account of context-sensitive expressions such as indexicals and demonstratives is that of Kaplan's two-dimensional semantics (the content- character distinction), further pursued in various directions by Stalnaker, Chalmers, and others. This chapter introduces and assesses the notion of context-sensitivity presented in this group of approaches, with a special focus on how it relates to the notion of cognitive significance and (...) whether it includes an intuitively plausible range of expressions within its scope. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the prospects of using two-dimensional semantics to account for context-sensitive expressions in dynamic discourse. (shrink)

Current theories of context see context as composed of information that is localizable to individual utterances. Current theories of discourse grant that discourses have important global properties that are not so localizable. In this paper, I argue that context, even narrowly construed as whatever combines with a sentence to determine truth conditions, must have a discourse -global component. I identify a context-dependence phenomenon related to the linguistic concepts of topic and focus, isolate the pertinent feature of (...) context, and show that this feature must be discourse -global in nature. I thus argue that context is as complicated as an entire discourse. (shrink)

The article investigates ways of actualization of mean field utterances used in modern German instructions considering the type of the text. The author determines and analyzes similarities and differences in linguistic means used in mean field utterances in the context of such text subtypes as instructions to household appliances, cosmetic products directions and prescribing information for pharmaceutical drugs use.

Jennifer Saul has argued that the speech acts approach to pornography, where pornography has the illocutionary force of subordinating women, is undermined by that very approach: if pornographic works are speech acts, they must be utterances in contexts; and if we take contexts seriously, it follows that only some pornographic viewings subordinate women. In an effort to defend the speech acts approach, Claudia Bianchi argues that Saul focuses on the wrong context to fix pornography’s illocutionary force. In response, I (...) defend Saul arguing that Bianchi doesn’t show Saul has focused on the wrong context. (shrink)

The paper is primarily concerned with laying out the space of positions that purport to account for semantic context sensitivity of natural language expressions and with making a prima facie case for relativism. I start with distinguishing between pre-semantic, semantic and post-semantic context sensitivity. In the following section I briefly present the classic picture of indexicals due to David Kaplan and assess some arguments for the introduction of certain parameters in the circumstances of evaluation (specifically, time). In section (...) III I envisage two views that purport to expand semantic context sensitivity beyond expressions from “the basic set”: indexicalism and contextualism. In section IV, by means of an example taken from John Perry, I draw attention to a specific form of semantic context sensitivity, namely that in which what is affected by context are the circumstances of evaluation of utterances rather than their content. The example leads to the necessity of distinguishing between two roles of context: a content-determinative one and a circumstance-determinative one. In section V I introduce relativism as the view incorporating the claim that context has a circumstance-determinative role and contrast it with the two views presented before. In the final section I analyze a certain type of argument usually adduced in favor of contextualism (the so-called “context-shifting arguments”) and show that in order to work it has to rule out relativism. I conclude by claiming that the battle must be fought by giving arguments to the effect that a certain parameter should or should not be part of the circumstances of evaluation rather than the content of utterances. (shrink)