Bibliographical data for
Author
Title of Edited Collection
Open MIND
Editors
Publication Date
January 2015
Publication Place
Frankfurt am Main, Germany
ISBN
9783958570221
Abstract
It is widely held that (truth-conditional) meaning is context-dependent. According to John Searle 's radical version of contextualism, the very notion of meaning “ is only applicable relative to a set of […] background assumptions ” ( Searle 1978 , p. 207), or background know-how. In earlier work, I have developed a (moderately externalist) “neo-Husserlian” account of the context-dependence of meaning and intentional content, based on Husserl ’s semantics of indexicals. Starting from this semantics, which strongly resembles today's mainstream semantics (section 2 ) I describe the (radical) contextualist challenge that mainstream semantics and pragmatics face in view of the (re-)discovery of what Searle calls the background of meaning (section 3 ). Following this, and drawing upon both my own neo-Husserlian account and ideas from Emma Borg , Gareth Evans and Timothy Williamson , I sketch a strategy for meeting this challenge (section 4 ) and draw a social-epistemological picture that allows us to characterize meaning and content in a way that takes account of contextualist insights yet makes it necessary to tone down Searle 's “hypothesis of the Background” (section 5 ).