What is a Context?
In this chapter, I examine a variety of criteria for context individuation, with an eye towards identifying and distinguishing various theoretical projects in semantics and pragmatics for which they would be appropriate. The discussion is organized around
- PDF / 302,259 Bytes
- 20 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 4 Downloads / 246 Views
Abstract In this chapter, I examine a variety of criteria for context individuation, with an eye towards identifying and distinguishing various theoretical projects in semantics and pragmatics for which they would be appropriate. The discussion is organized around six possible desiderata for contexts: (1) that they metaphysically determine proposition expressed, (2) that they be non-trivial (in a sense explained in the text), (3) that they provide epistemic illumination of how hearers understand what proposition was expressed, (4) that they be (in various senses) finite, (5) that they be non-intentionally characterized, and (6) that they be context-insensitively characterized. Particular attention is directed to the conceptions of context developed by Lewis, Stalnaker, and Davidson(ians). Keywords Context
Semantics Pragmatics Lewis Stalnaker Davidson
1 Introduction Language users occasionally utter sentences. In attempting to explain this behavior, theorists about language often advert to various features of these occasions under the rubric: the context of utterance. What is a context? Let’s narrow our scope somewhat. Sentences are uttered as parts of various speech-acts, and features of the occasion may be invoked to explain what determines which speech-act is performed. Suppose, though, we just assume it given
This paper originally appeared as Chapter II of my 1998 Harvard Ph.D. Dissertation, which was subsequently published as Gross (1998/2001). Many thanks to Alessandro Capone for the invitation to reprint it here. S. Gross (&) Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, US e-mail: [email protected]
A. Capone et al. (eds.), Perspectives on Pragmatics and Philosophy, Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology 1, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-01011-3_5, Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013
113
114
S. Gross
that the speech-act in question is assertion. Now, a typical instance of assertion involves (1) an utterance of a sentence with a certain standing meaning in a language, in order thereby (2) to express a proposition, and perhaps in addition (3) to communicate pragmatically some further proposition(s). Features of the occasion of utterance may be invoked in explaining facts at any of these three levels— the pre-semantic, semantic, and post-semantic, as they might be called.1 But suppose we focus just on level (2): what determines what proposition is expressed, given the meaning of the sentence uttered. (It’s clear that natural language sentences are pervasively context-sensitive in this sense: what propositions speakers express in uttering them is not determined by their meaning alone. ‘The kettle is black’ can be used to express a variety of propositions, depending for instance on the kettle in question, the time of utterance, whether the layer of soot matters (the speakers might be photographers composing a black-and-white still-life, or they might be kettle collectors wondering whether, beneath its sooty exterior, this is a rare white 1924 model XYZ), and more.) Our focus thus nar
Data Loading...
