This, then, is more or less the received opinion, which has been challenged by philosophers on the basis of ideas that partly go back to Husserl—in particular the notion of background. Thus, in his 1978 essay on “Literal Meaning” Searle claims that:
[...] for a large number of cases the notion of the literal meaning of a sentence only has application relative to a set of background assumptions, and furthermore these background assumptions are not all and could not all be realized in the semantic structure of the sentence in the way that presuppositions and indexically dependent elements of the sentence’s truth conditions are realized in the semantic structure of the sentence. (Searle 1978, p. 210)
On this view, the role of context is not simply that of fixing the reference of indexical expressions in a semantically well-regulated manner. There is contextual content determination everywhere, and correspondingly there is semantic underdetermination all over the place. There is no propositional meaning content attached to a sentence independently of context; and (some authors would add) context itself is not a well-defined notion: there is no neat list of semantically fixed context-factors and context-sensitive expressions. There is a huge and confusing background of assumptions, or know-how, that we bring to a given linguistic utterance, without which the utterance would fail to express any semantic content, and to thereby determine truth conditions; and there is no hope of constructing a formal theory of this background (or “context”) and the way it determines truth-conditional content. Thus runs Searle’s radical contextualist challenge to mainstream semantics and pragmatics.
To motivate contextualism (so conceived) about meaning and content, consider a situation in which an object is hidden in a box. All we know about that object is that it is the only object in that box. Unlike us, the speaker knows which kind of object is in the box. She does not know that we do not know this; she intends to refer to a particular object of that kind, the one she takes to be in the box, or to one of its aspects (dependent features). She utters the sentence
(S1) This is red.
to make a statement about the object or aspect, without implying or suggesting anything else. What statement does she make? What is the respective meaning expressed in this utterance? What does the speaker say? According to radical contextualism, this depends on a wide variety of factors, not encoded in the linguistic meaning of the sentence uttered.
For a bird to be red (in the normal case), it should have most of the surface of its body red, though not its beak, legs, eyes, and of course its inner organs. Furthermore, the red color should be the bird’s natural color, since we normally regard a bird as being ‘really’ red even if it is painted white all over. A kitchen table, on the other hand, is red even if it is only painted red, and even if its ‘natural’ color underneath the paint is, say, white. Moreover, for a table to be red only its upper surface needs to be red, but not necessarily its legs and its bottom surface. Similarly, a red apple, as Quine pointed out, needs to be red only on the outside, but a red hat needs to be red only in its external upper surface, a red crystal is red both inside and outside, and a red watermelon is red only inside. [...] In short, what counts for one type of thing to be red is not what counts for another. (Lahav 1989, p. 264)
So, in which way does the relevant meaning of S1 (“This is red”) depend on context? I want to consider three options.
Speaker intentions: Are the referential intentions of the speaker, such as their intention to refer to a particular bird by “this,” part of the relevant context? One problem with this answer is that it prevents us from adopting a conception of context according to which shared knowledge of context is what (in addition to shared knowledge of conventional linguistic meaning) enables both speaker and hearer to grasp one and the same respective meaning in cases of successful communication. After all, context, thus understood, is supposed to help the hearer make out the speaker’s referential intentions, among other things. So the present answer does not help—provided we conceive of context in a communication-theoretical way—as a means, so to speak, that in accordance with the relevant linguistic meaning enables the hearer to determine the respective meaning expressed.[9]
Object referred to: Is the relevant context simply identical to what’s in the box? But the speaker might only be referring to a particular aspect of the object in the box, rather than to the whole object. So we are thrown back to the speaker’s referential intentions—which do not help us, as we saw above.
Background assumptions: Does the relevant context consist of background assumptions about the object, or kind of object, in the box? Which assumptions, exactly? It seems to be impossible to make a comprehensive list, because every set of assumptions brings with it further assumptions. For example, suppose that the speaker takes an apple to be in the box. Apples normally count as red even if their skin is not completely red. However, consider a social group who have only encountered two kinds of apples thus far (as far as their colour is concerned): apples whose skin is completely red and apples whose skin is completely green; imagine that their apples instantaneously turn red when ripe. These people probably wouldn’t classify an almost-ripe apple of the kind we know as “red.” In fact, they wouldn’t know what to say, because they have always assumed that there are only two kinds of apple-colour, and because this background assumption determines the meaning they conventionally associate with S1 as applied to apples. So shall we regard the assumption that there are grades of apple-redness corresponding to their ripeness as part of the context of our assertive uses of the sentence “this [the speaker refers to an apple] is red”? But how many grades are relevant? What if there had been exactly three apple colours? This would probably again lead to a different use, and hence respective meaning, of S1, as applied to apples, and so on and so forth.
Obviously these sorts of examples can easily be multiplied. Is there any way to avoid the following radical contextualist conclusion?
Radical contextualism =Df There is no fixed relation between
(i) the linguistic or literal meaning of a sentence S;
(ii) a neatly defined set of context parameters; and
(iii) the respective meaning and truth condition of S in the context of utterance,
such that (iii) is uniquely determined by (i) and (ii).
Rather, the respective meaning is always determined differently, from situation to situation, so that the notion of a conventionally (co-)determined semantic content is untenable.