Abstract
There are several semantic accounts of context-sensitive expressions. Broadly, while contextualism claims that a context-sensitive expression’s interpretation is sensitive to some feature of the context of utterance, relativism considers judgment or assessment to play a significant role in the expression’s context-sensitivity. The main motivation for relativism comes from consideration of retraction data. Given variance in retraction data, we argue that the best move is to espouse a pluralism of the following sort. Take an expression E to be such that its interpretation is sensitive to a feature f. Then, given a context of use \(c_1\) and a context of assessment \(c_2\), we allow the interpretation of E to be sensitive to f in \(c_1\) or f in \(c_2\). In other words, there’s no need to choose between a contextualist or relativist postsemantics. The proposed theory welcomes more generality in formalism.
This is part of an ongoing project. Many thanks to Éno Agolli, Mitch Green, Magdalena Kaufmann, Stefan Kaufmann, Zhiyu Luo, Dilip Ninan, and Lionel Shapiro for comments and discussion. Thanks also to two anonymous reviewers for LENLS. All mistakes are my own.
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Notes
- 1.
Although we expand on what sort of utterances we take to be taste utterances, we have in mind the usual utterances of personal taste like Licorice is tasty. Also note that although we primarily consider retraction data about predicates of personal taste and epistemic modals, the scope of this paper extends to all language for which a relativism of the two sorts can be argued for.
- 2.
Also see Belnap and Green 1994.
- 3.
See Pickel et al. 2018.
- 4.
Obviously, the two step procedure is not essential to context-dependence as Lewis (1980) argues; uncurrying the two functions gives us one function.
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- 6.
- 7.
This definition of truth of a proposition is stated in the style MacFarlane adopts in his 2014 (cf. MacFarlane 2014, 105).
- 8.
Note that both non-indexical contextualism and assessment-sensitivity assume contents to be simple in that they are evaluated with respect to taste standards. The more traditional contextualism (cf. Kratzer (1977), DeRose (1996), Soames (2002), Stanley (2004)), which MacFarlane calls indexical contextualism would let contents be such that before evaluation occurs, they are already specified with regards to the parameter that the non-indexical contextualist would consider relevant for evaluation of the expressed content. In other words, under the traditional contextualism about taste predicates, the content expressed by (3) would be a set of world-time pairs. Whether contents are complex or not is an interesting question, but one too complicated to be considered for the purposes of this paper. For a comparison between the two positions, see MacFarlane (2009). Also see Cappelen & Hawthorne (2009).
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Jabbar, A. (2023). Pluralism for Relativists: A New Framework for Context Dependence. In: Yada, K., Takama, Y., Mineshima, K., Satoh, K. (eds) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. JSAI-isAI 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13856. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36190-6_18
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