Epistemic or semantic contextualism has been created as an answer to a sceptical challenge against knowledge in the sense of episteme—defined as justified, true belief. It is claimed in this conception that the satisfaction conditions for “x knows that p”—i.e., the truth-conditions of sentences—on whose basis we ascribe knowledge to a subject, depend on the context in which they are uttered, i.e., on epistemic standards obtaining in these contexts (cf. Palczewski 2013, p. 197). “Contextualists speak of the semantic value of knowledge ascriptions as somehow shifting with context […] The parameter that shifts with the context may be the threshold of justification, the standard of epistemic position, the set of epistemic alternatives” (Preyer & Peter 2005, p. 3).
In contrast to contextual respective meaning, for literal truth-conditional meaning we have to look to semantic content. As Searle claims, it is a meaning with “zero context”, determined by the meaning of its semantic components and syntactic rules of composition. However, “for a large class of sentences there is no such thing as the zero or null context for the interpretation of sentences, and that as far as our semantic competence is concerned we understand the meaning of such sentences only against a set of background assumptions about the contexts in which the sentence could be appropriately uttered” (Searle 1978, p. 207).
The distinction between literal and contextual meaning is clear for Beyer. Literal meaning is not usage. It is a subject of the semantics but not pragmatics. One can grasp the literal meaning of the sentence “The snow is white”, adding to it that this sentence is true only if the snow is white. But when a speaker utters the sentence “The snow is white”, the hearer needs not only to understand the literal meaning, because otherwise he could simply ask “So what?” The hearer needs also to interpret the statement, inferring what kind of linguistic function this sentence fulfils. The hearer needs to understand why (or for what purpose) this statement has been uttered by the speaker. In other words, to grasp the proper meaning he needs to establish what pragmatic and epistemic consequences it has. Thus, the pragmatic consequence is investigated by checking what else the utterance communicates, and what the sentence pragmatically implies. But meaning as usage is not only a matter of implicatures or presuppositions. The epistemic consequences concern the setting of conditions in which the sentence can be truly uttered—that is, the background. To understand an utterance expressing some kind of intentional state, both speaker and hearer have to dispose the background, i.e., knowledge-how. In fact, this is a passive form of knowledge, which depends on physical and social determinants, on which a subject has a little influence and in which she is deeply rooted. Such utterances are evidence of propositional attitudes with certain representational content. In other words, a subject uttering a sentence also expresses (using the terms of folk psychology) his attitude toward its content. However, according to Searle, propositional attitudes are not intentional states, understood as a relation of being directed (or of taking an attitude, i.e., belief) toward a judgment in a logical sense, expressed in the form of a sentence (utterance). “There is indeed a relation ascribed when one ascribes an Intentional to a person, but is not a relation between a person and a proposition, rather it is a relation of representation between the Intentional state and the thing represented by it. In other words, proposition is rather a content of a statement than its object” (Searle 1983, p. 19).
Searle’s standpoint does not convince Beyer, who claims that to express or correctly ascribe a meaning intention and, consequently, to grasp the literal truth (the conditional meaning of an assertive utterance) one does not need to meet the requirements of Searle’s Background Hypothesis—according to which a subject needs to dispose a set of nonrepresentational capacities to correctly interpret the meaning of utterances. These requirements must be fulfilled only by sentences-producers, who can be regarded as “experts”—however, not necessarily in a scientific sense.