Sunday, October 01, 2006

Jonathan Berg, "Is Semantics Still Possible?"

The standard view of semantics, that every disambiguated sentence has a determinate semantic content, relative to an assignment of contexts to its indexical expressions, and not necessarily identical to what may be conveyed (pragmatically) by its utterance, is not threatened by contextualist attacks; semantics may be concerned with a "strict notion" of what is said, whereas the contextualists are concerned with a "loose notion". Showing that the loose notion is contextually sensitive does not show that the strict notion is. The only real threat to traditional semantics would be an alternative theory that explains semantic phenomena better.

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