Abstract
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.
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Preliminary versions of this paper have been delivered at the 10th IPrA conference, Göteborg (2007), and at the Conference on Context-dependence, perspective and relativity in language and thought, ENS, Paris (2007); I’m grateful to both audiences for useful feedback. I also benefited from detailed comments and criticisms on a previous written version from Marc Dominicy and two anonymous reviewers. Philippe De Brabanter’s patient and insightful remarks are far too numerous to be acknowledged in footnotes; this should not prevent the usual disclaimer from applying. My research is supported by a post-doctoral researcher grant from the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique de la Communauté Française de Belgique (F.R.S.-FNRS).
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Kissine, M. From contexts to circumstances of evaluation: is the trade-off always innocuous?. Synthese 184, 199–216 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-010-9732-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-010-9732-4