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- Tom Donaldson & Ernie Lepore, Context-Sensitivity.(1) I’m Spartacus! [Said by Spartacus] (2) I’m Spartacus! [Said by Antoninus] What Spartacus said was true, and what Antoninus said was not. Yet the two slaves uttered the exact same sentence, so how can this be? Admittedly, the puzzle is not very hard, and its solution is uncontroversial. The first person pronoun “I” is – to use a technical term – context sensitive. When Spartacus uses it, it refers to Spartacus; when Antoninus uses it, it refers to Antoninus. So when Spartacus says “I’m Spartacus”, he expresses the true proposition that he, Spartacus, is Spartacus. And when Antoninus says it, he expresses the false proposition that he, Antoninus, is Spartacus. The sentence “I’m Spartacus” expresses different propositions when used by different people. Another example will help. Contrast these two utterances, made by subjects in a study carried out by experimental epistemologists: (3) This is a zebra. [Said by someone while pointing at a zebra] (4) This is a zebra. [Said by someone while pointing at a cleverly decorated mule].In my reading list | Discuss this article | Edit | Categorize |My bibliography
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The story of the pre-Marxian ideology of Spartacus is not without its own peculiar interests. It is a strange narrative prompted both by the birth of a modern analytical, and political, interest in slavery, and in parallel debates over the meaning of liberty and servitude.
Puzzles about sentences containing expressions of certain sorts, such as predicates of personal taste, epistemic modals, and ‘know’, have spawned families of views that go by the names of Contextualism and Relativism. In the case of predicates of personal taste, which I will be focusing on, contextualist views say that the contents of sentences like “Uni is delicious” and “The Aristocrats is hilarious” vary somehow with the context of utterance. Such a sentence semantically expresses different propositions in different contexts, depending (...)
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i> A lot of natural language sentences are context sensitive – the way that they represent things as being, and the message that their use conveys to their audience, depends on the context in which they’re used. When Butch says “I am hungry”, he expresses the proposition that Butch is hungry. When Sundance says, “I am hungry”, he expresses the proposition that Sundance is hungry. Somewhat more controversially: in some contexts, the sentence “Sundance is ready” expresses the proposition that Sundance (...)
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| | Other links: sitemaker.umich.edu springerlink.com | Scholar | More.. Two quite different issues need to be addressed with regard to the sentence "God exists." One is whether or not the sentence expresses a proposition (something that is true or false and that can be believed or disbelieved). If we say, "Yes, it expresses a proposition," then the second issue comes in: Is that proposition true or false?[ 1].
In _Insensitive Semantics_, Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore (C&L) defend Semantic Minimalism and Speech Act Pluralism. Semantic Minimalism concerns the effect of utterance context on _semantic_ content. It holds, in contrast to the views of a wide variety of linguists and philosophers of language, that this effect is limited to fixing the semantic value of the small number of expressions they argue are genuinely context- sensitive: uncontroversial indexicals, demonstratives, tense markers, and perhaps a few others. What’s more, according to C&L, (...)
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| | Other links: mysite.verizon.net blackwell-synergy.com ingentaconnect.com | Scholar | More.. On the standard view of epistemic modals such as ‘might’ and ‘must,’ sentences in which these terms figure express different propositions in different contexts of utterance. On one such view, the sentence ‘water might be an element,’ when uttered in context C, expresses the proposition that it is compatible with everything known in C that water is an element. This standard view, however, has recently faced a number of objections. Appealing to a variety of data, several authors have argued for (...)
