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(2009) Synthese 166 (2).
It’s a presupposition of a very common way of thinking about context-sensitivity in language that the semantic contribution made by a bit of context-sensitive vocabulary is sensitive only to features of the speaker’s situation at the time of utterance. I argue that this is false, and that we need a theory of context-dependence that allows for content to depend not just on the features of the utterance’s origin, but also on features of its destination. There are cases in which a single utterance semantically conveys different propositions to different members of its audience, which force us to say that what a sentence conveys depends not just on the context in which it is uttered, but also on the context in which it is received.
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/s11229-007-9284-4
Full citation:
Egan, A. (2009). Billboards, bombs and shotgun weddings. Synthese 166 (2), pp. 251-279.
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