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Synthese (2009) 166:231250
DOI 10.1007/s11229-007-9286-2
Received: 1 April 2007 / Accepted: 1 May 2007 / Published online: 21 December 2007 Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2007
Abstract Philosophers on all sides of the contextualism debates have had an overly narrow conception of what semantic context sensitivity could be. They have conated context sensitivity (dependence of truth or extension on features of context) with indexicality (dependence of content on features of context). As a result of this conation, proponents of contextualism have taken arguments that establish only context sensitivity to establish indexicality, while opponents of contextualism have taken arguments against indexicality to be arguments against context sensitivity. Once these concepts are carefully pulled apart, it becomes clear that there is conceptual space in semantic theory for nonindexical forms of contextualism that have many advantages over the usual indexical forms.
Keywords Contextualism Context sensitivity Indexicality
1 Introduction
It is common for philosophers to call an expression context-sensitive just in case its content varies with the context in which it is used:
To say that e is context sensitive is to say that its contribution to the propositions expressed by utterances of sentences containing e varies from context to context. (Cappelen and Lepore 2005, p. 146)
A sentence is context-sensitive if and only if it expresses different propositions relative to different contexts of use. (Stanley 2005, p. 16)
J. MacFarlane (B)
Department of Philosophy, University of California, Berkeley, USA e-mail: [email protected]
Nonindexical contextualism
John MacFarlane
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232 Synthese (2009) 166:231250
To say that vague predicates are context sensitive is to say that they are indexical. While the semantic content of an indexical varies from one context of utterance to another, its meaning does not. (Soames 2002, p. 245)
In what follows, I will argue that we should understand context sensitivity more broadly, as dependence of extension on context. It is possible for an expression to be semantically context-sensitive, in this sense, even if it has the same content at every context of use.1
The point is not merely that we are associating the word context-sensitive with the wrong conceptafter all, we are free to use technical terms in whatever way is most useful. The problem is that philosophers are using only one word where there are two distinct...