(DOWNLOAD) "Herman Cappelen and Ernest Lepore, Insensitive Semantics. A Defence of Semantic Minimalism and Speech Act Pluralism" by Critica * Book PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Herman Cappelen and Ernest Lepore, Insensitive Semantics. A Defence of Semantic Minimalism and Speech Act Pluralism
- Author : Critica
- Release Date : January 01, 2008
- Genre: Reference,Books,Religion & Spirituality,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 68 KB
Description
Herman Cappelen and Ernest Lepore, Insensitive Semantics. A Defence of Semantic Minimalism and Speech Act Pluralism, Blackwell, Oxford, 2005, xii + 219 pp. I am pleased to review Insensitive Semantics, a volume that is really thought-provoking and has the merit of pushing context-invariant semantics after accepting that there is a limited class of (really) context-sensitive expressions. On the one hand, Cappelen and Lepore accept a limited kind of pragmatic intrusion into semantics, in relation to the truth-conditional contribution of (really) context-sensitive expressions; on the other hand, they constrain severely contextual contribution to truth-conditional semantics by saying that the class of really context-sensitive expressions is very small --limited to pronominals ('he', 'she', etc.), deictic expressions ('this', that', 'now') and a few perspectival expressions such as 'enemy'. Cappelen and Lepore argue against the radical contextualist's claim that rnost, if not all, linguistic expressions are context-sensitive and, furthermore, want to prove that the position called 'moderate contextualism' easily slides into 'radical contextualism'. Moderate contextualism is the view that only a number of linguistic expressions, but not all of them, are context-sensitive (and usually contextualists of this type make use of hidden indexicals). Radical contextualism is the view that all linguistic expressions are semantically underdetermined and, thus, acquire full truth-conditional meaning in context. Moderate contextualism easily slides into radical contextualism because the considerations usable for proving that a number of expressions are context-sensitive could generalize to cover all linguistic expressions.