Online research in philosophy

If you think that semantic minimalism is the only alternative to contextualism but you’d rather do without Cappelen and Lepore’s mysteriously minimal “propositions,” you can. You just have to recognize that being semantically incomplete does not make a sentence context-sensitive. You don’t have to go through the ritual of repeatedly incanting things like this: “John is ready” expresses the proposition that John is ready. Instead, you can opt for Radical Minimalism and suppose that “John is ready” and its ilk fall short of semantically expressing propositions – their semantic contents are propositional “radicals.” Now C&L think they’ve addressed Radical Minimalism and offered objections to it. So they find it strange and bizarre that I think they haven’t. In fact, they persist in confusing semantic incompleteness with context sensitivity. If they appreciated the difference, they might even welcome the opportunity to adopt a form of semantic minimalism that does without the minimal propositions that everyone but them find incredible (pun intended).

Mind and Language, 2006. Symposium on Insensitive Semantics. Reply to Ann Bezuidenhout, Steven Gross, Francois Recanati, Zoltan Szabo and Charles Travis.

Research on quotation has mostly focussed in the past years on mixed or open quotation. In a recent book-length discussion of the topic, Cappelen and Lepore have abandon their previous Davidsonian allegiances, proposing a new view that they describe as minimalist, to a good extend on the basis of facts concerning mixed quotation. In this paper I critically review Cappelen and Lepore’s new minimalist proposals, briefly outlining my preferred Davidsonian view as a useful foil. I explore first their allegedly non-Davidsonian, anti-contextualist views about pure quotation, and then their new views on mixed quotation. I have complained in the first place that their proposals are not presented as perspicuously as they should be; and in the second place that, when we have a clearer picture of what appears to be the favoured account, the differences with their previous proposals and others already in the literature are not as great as they claim.

In my commentary on Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore’s aptly titled book, Insensitive Semantics, I stake out a middle ground between their version of Semantic Minimalism and Contextualism. My kind of Semantic Minimalism does without the “minimal propositions” posited by C&L. It allows that some sentences do not express propositions, even relative to contexts. Instead, they are semantically incomplete. It is not a form of contextualism, since being semantically incomplete is not a way of being context-sensitive. In their reply to my commentary, C&L seem to miss this point. Exaggerating the force of their slippery slope argument, they continue to suppose that contextualism is the only alternative to their version of minimalism. They contend that I haven’t replied to their central criticism, but in fact they haven’t replied to mine.

No semantic theory is complete without an account of context sensitivity. But there is little agreement over its scope and limits even though everyone invokes intuition about an expression's behavior in context to determine its context sensitivity. Minimalists like Cappelen and Lepore identify a range of tests which isolate clear cases of context sensitive expressions, such as ‘I’, ‘here’, and ‘now’, to the exclusion of all others. Contextualists try to discredit the tests and supplant them with ones friendlier to their positions. In this paper we will explore and evaluate Cappelen and Hawthorne's recent attempts to discredit Cappelen and Lepore's tests and replace them with others. We will argue they have failed to provide sufficient reason to abandon minimalism. If we are right, minimalism about context sensitivity is still viable.

o (2000), 243). In particular, the idea is that binding interactions between the relevant expressions and natural lan- guage quantifiers are best explained by the hypothesis that those expressions harbor hidden but bindable variables. Recently, however, Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore have rejected such binding arguments for the presence of hid- den variables on the grounds that they overgeneralize — that, if sound, such arguments would establish the presence of hidden variables in all sorts of ex- pressions where it is implausible that they exist (Cappelen and Lepore (2005), Cappelen and Lepore (2002)).1 In what follows we respond to Cappelen’s and Lepore’s attempted reductio by bringing out crucial disanalogies between cases where the binding argument is successful and cases where it is not. But we have a deeper purpose than merely to respond to Cappelen and Lepore: we think the attempted reductio goes wrong by not taking sufficiently seriously the nature of the binding relation that holds between quantifiers and arguments/variables, and that our criticism will serve to highlight the nature and importance of this relation.

Cappelen and Lepore (2005) begin their critique of contextualism with an anecdote about an exercise they do with their undergraduate students (who I take it are meant to be naïve subjects whose linguistic intuitions have not been contaminated by mistaken philosophical theories). The test is to ask students to categorize types of expressions. Students quickly get the hang of the idea that referring expressions (like indexicals and pronouns) belong to a single category. They’re then asked whether they think that common nouns like ‘penguin’ or adjectives like ‘red’ belong to this category, and of course students are reluctant to see any similarity here. Students are then told that, as incredible as it may seem, there are philosophers (called contextualists) who think that the indexical ‘I’ and the common noun ‘penguin’ belong to the same category and who think that these types of expressions are context-sensitive in just the same way.