Research Group
in Analytic Philosophy

Abstract

Stojnić’s Context and Coherence (2021) defends an intra-linguistic metasemantics of context-dependence: “linguistic rules … determine particular values of contextual parameters on which context-sensitive items depend for their meaning at any given point in discourse, independently of speaker intentions, and non-linguistic features of utterance situation”. Here I’ll defend a moderate version of intentionalism, to use the corresponding label in parallel debates on the interpretation of fictions. I’ll argue that, if languages are constituted by conventions as she needs to assume, this is because they are social tools for speakers to acquire the normative commitments that underwrite the communicative functions of language. But acquiring these commitments is essentially an intentional matter, even if (as in other areas, games or traffic codes for instance) we allow for exceptions for participants who are not fully competent on different grounds. This makes it to be expected that languages rely on the specific intentions of speakers, to the extent that they can be competently made available to their audiences, in fixing the semantic values of context-dependent expressions when nothing else is required. This theoretically established prediction appears to be clearly corroborated by the facts; I’ll add a few suggestive observations to the many examples that each of us may cite just by casually checking the ordinary use of demonstratives. Stojnić’s brilliant tour-de-force, in particular her suggestive expansion of conventionalist tools by her compelling appeal to the role played by coherence relations, doesn’t in the end offer good reasons to abandon moderate intentionalism.