Moderately Sensitive Semantics

What is context sensitivity? What tests are reliable indicators of this phenomenon? Here I shall take up and develop some themes of Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore’s book Insensitive Semantics, in order to better understand the phenomenon, and the tests that reveal it. If we eschew such tests, and rely on intuitions about what is said, then, Cappelen and Lepore argue, it is hard to resist the conclusion that all of language is contextually sensitive. While most semanticists take themselves to be Moderate Contextualists—who hold that natural language contains a broad but limited stock of context-sensitive items—Cappelen and Lepore claim that Moderate Contextualism is an unstable position. The same intuitions that lead semanticists to espouse Moderate Contextualism should lead them to instead espouse Radical Contextualism—which is the view that context sensitivity is so rampant, no natural language sentence ever semantically expresses a proposition independent of context. The phenomenon of what is said is so unconstrained that, if we try to capture it semantically, we shall be forced to adopt Radical Contextualism. Since, Cappelen and Lepore claim, the arguments for Moderate Contextualism hinge on the desire to account for what is said, there is a slippery slope from Moderate Contextualism to Radical Contextualism.