Inferentialism, Context-Shifting and Background Assumptions
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Inferentialism, Context‑Shifting and Background Assumptions Bartosz Kaluziński1 Received: 21 March 2020 / Accepted: 19 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract In this paper I present how the normative inferentialist can make the distinction between sentence meaning and content of the utterance. The inferentialist can understand sentence meaning as a role conferred to that sentence by the rules governing inferential transitions and content of the utterance as just a part of sentence meaning. I attempt to show how such a framework can account for prominent scenarios presented by contextualists as a challenge to semantic minimalism/literalism. I argue that inferentialism can address contextualist challenges in a simple and effective manner by understanding sentence meaning as broad, but invariant.
1 Introduction In the recent years one can observe growing interest in the issue of contextualism in the philosophy of language; this is the view that emphasizes the role that extralinguistic context plays in determining linguistic meaning (e.g. Recanati 2004, 2010; Travis 1997; Borg 2004, 2012; Cappelen and Lepore 2005; Stanley 2007). Traditionally, following Grice (1957), it is claimed that one should distinguish between context-invariant sentence meaning (that is a domain of semantics) and contextsensitive content of utterance (which may be heavily influenced by pragmatics). It seems pretty obvious that certain expressions are context-sensitive, for example “I” or “foreign”. The expression “I was the 44. President of the US” expresses a different proposition when the utterer changes. Its truth-value is also affected by context: it is true when uttered by Barack Obama, and false when uttered by anybody else. The “I” in this utterance refers to the person who actually is uttering it. Similarly, the content of “This is a foreign car” is heavily influenced by an extralinguistic factor, namely the place where it is uttered. For example, it would be true of VW
* Bartosz Kaluziński [email protected] 1
Faculty of Philosophy, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Szamarzewskiego Street 89c, 60‑568 Poznań, Poland
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Golf when uttered in Paris, but it would be false when uttered about the same car in Berlin. The advocates of contextualism claim that there are much more context-dependent expressions than these obvious examples presented above. To support their claim, they use different types of arguments: I. they claim that when the extralinguistic context is shifting, there is a change in meaning; II. they claim that semantically determined truth-conditions are unintuitive and play no role in ordinary communication; III. they claim that semantics is unable to determine the meaning of the sentence and there is a need for involvement of certain pragmatic processes and/or background assumptions. In this paper I investigate more closely several scenarios presented by contextualists as a challenge for semantic minimalism. These have been the subject of an intense debate but I wo
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