Arguing for a version of meaning that is context dependent, yet still accessible to every competent language user, Beyer combines two standpoints toward the relation between meaning and intentionality in the work of Edmund Husserl and John Searle. Linking the theses of both philosophers, he assumes that:
The meaning of assertive utterances is context dependent.
Assertive utterances express not only propositional content but also an intentional state.
Searle’s Background Hypothesis about the requirement of non-intentional background on the part of the speaker and hearer for recognizing intentional states expressed by assertive utterances as well as for grasping the respective meaning of the utterances could be relevant to an understanding of the context-dependency of assertive utterances, but only in a restricted form.
Beyer’s main thesis can be summarized as follows:
The speaker uttering a sentence intentionally presents herself as performing or undergoing an act, but if the hearer does not recognize that intention, she does not thereby fail to grasp the literal truth-conditional meaning of an utterance. Hence, only the group of speakers (utterance producers) must meet the requirements of Searle’s Background Hypothesis.
In other words, according to Beyer, context dependence does not prevent competent language users who lack the correct background from grasping the literal truth-conditional meaning of an utterance.
Beyer gives brilliant examples, which justify this main claim. The first group contains indexicals like “I”, “here”, and “now”, which share the same general meaning function—which I generally prefer to call “sense” or “concept”—but which have different respective meanings, that is, a different extension. Take an example, in which Subject 1 asserts: “I have blood type A”, and Subject 2 also asserts: “I have blood type A”. Both utterances have the same general meaning-function, but express different truth-conditional contents—or propositions. Using an alternative philosophical terminology, they have the same intension but different extension, which results in the famous conclusion that intension does not determine extension (Putnam 1975). However, according to Hilary Putnam’s Twin Earth Thought Experiment, even natural kinds “have an indexical unnoticed component” (1975, p. 152). This forces the conclusion that every sentence is somehow context dependent, including those containing concepts of natural kinds.
To the second group of examples belong sentences without established uses, such as have been proposed by Searle: “Bill opened the mountain”; “Sally opened the grass”; “Sam opened the sun”. As Searle claims, in the case of such sentences we have no clear idea what they mean, or else we fail to find a proper way of understanding the sentences because we lack the necessary background capacities and social practices.
We know how to open doors, books, eyes, wounds and walls; and the differences in the Network and in the Background of practices produce different understandings of the same verb. Furthermore, we simply have no common practices of opening mountains, grass, or suns. It would be easy to invent a Background, i.e., to imagine a practice, that would give a clear sense to the idea of opening mountains, grass, and suns, but we have no such common Background at present. (Searle 1983, p. 147)
However, Beyer claims that even if we do not have the background we can still grasp the literal meaning of such sentences. We lack knowledge about verification—here Beyer agrees with Emma Borg (2004)—i.e., knowledge-how, but we can still understand the sentence.
Another example given by Beyer concerns situations where the speaker utters a sentence that the hearer repeats, while referring to another object than that referred to by the speaker. In other words, the hearer mistakenly takes for entitlement[1] an uttered claim about an object, which he thinks is the right referent—for example, when saying “This is red”, the sentence refers to a ball in a box, which the hearer does not know about because he has seen only a red apple being put into the box. Beyer claims that, according to the principle of knowledge maximization formulated by Timothy Williamson, the speaker should be regarded still as possessing some knowledge about the apple, even if he has a false belief about that object, because even a false judgment in certain circumstances can count as knowledgeable. However, Beyer proposes a modification of this principle, which should, according to him, be “supplemented by a more traditional theory of justification, drawing upon notions of observation, memory and testimony” (Beyer this collection). From the examples given above Beyer infers that contextualism is the right account for this phenomenon, but only in a form that allows minimal semantic knowledge concerning the literal meaning, which can be possessed even in the absence of Background.