Content, Context and Composition
Francis Jeffry Pelletier, Peter Pagin · 2007
In the recent debate on the semantic/pragmatic divide, Herman Cappe-len and Ernie Lepore (2005) on the one hand, and François Recanati (2004) on the other, occupy almost diametrically opposed positions as regards the role of semantics for communication, while largely agreeing on important features of pragmatics. According to Cappelen and Lepore (CL), semantic context sensitivity of natural language sentences is re-stricted to what is determined by a particular minimal set of canonically context sensitive expressions. If you try to go beyond that set, as has often been done in recent semantic theories, to reach a position of moder-ate contextualism, your reasons will force you to the much more extreme position of radical contextualism. That is CL’s instability thesis. They argue for it by means of a number of examples intended to illustrate how you are off on a slippery slope if you admit any context sensitivity beyond the basic one. If radical contextualism is true, systematic semantics is not