Dr. Steven Gross
Contextualists (Chomsky, Sperber & Wilson, Recanati, etc.) hold that sentence meaning is pervasively sub-propositional. That is, it typically fails to determine truth-conditions, typically in multiple ways. To retrieve propositional content from a speaker's utterance of a sentence, a hearer must also track and relevantly bring to bear lots of contextual information, including the relevant purposes, interests, beliefs, etc. of the conversational participants. Obvious sources of such "context-sensitivity"--indexicals, demonstratives, pronouns, temporal expressions--are just the tip of the iceberg. Against this view, it's been argued that contextualists have a hard time explaining our ability to "share content": our ability to understand *across* contexts what someone said. I will critically examine an argument to this effect by Cappelen and Lepore. My presentation will serve as something of an advertisement for what might be the topic of my seminar next year. Visit our website: http://www.cogsci.jhu.edu (menu header: Events)
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