“Meaning” is a popular term in philosophical slogans. Meaning is said to be normative; not to be in the head. The notion of meaning is (nevertheless) said to be the key to the notion of intentional content, to only be applicable relative to a set of background assumptions, and meaning is said to be context-dependent. These slogans are not unrelated, and all of them have a reading, I suppose, in which they are true. Here I shall mainly focus on the last two slogans, regarding background and context. My main question will be twofold:
In which sense, and to which extent, can the meaning of assertive utterances be said to be context-dependent?
Does this context-dependence have an impact on the validity of Searle’s Background Hypothesis, which states that the intentional experiences expressed by assertive utterances, and bearing their respective meaning, and the mental acts of grasping this meaning, both require a non-intentional background on the part of the speaker/hearer, relative to which the truth-conditional content and the satisfaction conditions of the relevant experience are determined?
The upshot will be that (1) whilst there may be expressions lacking the context-sensitivity that many expressions (namely, the indexicals) possess in virtue of their conventional linguistic meaning, there is a sense (to be explained in terms of the background) in which context-dependence is ubiquitous; but that (2) this context-dependence does not prevent competent language users who lack the sort of individual background in terms of which this particular context-dependence can be defined (the “consumers”) from grasping the literal truth-conditional meaning (the semantic content) which an assertive utterance expresses on a given occasion.