Insensitive Semantics: A Defense of Semantic Minimalism and Speech Act Pluralism

The central opponents in this book are contextualists, philosophers and linguists who inflate the role of context in semantics. The common thread that runs throughout the authors’ criticism of contextualism is that it fails to account for how we communicate across contexts. People with different background beliefs, goals, audiences, and perceptual inputs can understand each other. They can agree or disagree. They can say, assert, claim, state, investigate or make fun of the very same claim. No theory of communication is adequate unless it explains how this is possible. Contextualists cannot provide such an explanation. Semantic minimalism combined with speech act pluralism can.