%0 Book Section %A Beyer, Christian %D 2015 %T Meaning, Context, and Background %E Metzinger, Thomas K. %E Windt, Jennifer M. %B Open MIND %C Frankfurt am Main %I MIND Group %& 4(T) %! Meaning, Context, and Background %@ 9783958570221 %R 10.15502/9783958570221 %X 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). %K Background hypothesis, Borg, Content, Context, Contextualism, Evans, Externalism, Husserl, Intentionality, Interpretation, Knowledge, Meaning, Minimalism, Reference, Searle, Williamson %U https://open-mind.net/papers/meaning-context-and-background %G English