Literalism and Contextualism: Some Varieties

Abstract

Abstract According to the dominant position in the philosophy of language, we may legitimately ascribe truth-conditional content to sentences, independently of the speech act which the sentence is used to perform. This position, which I call ‘literalism’, contrasts with another view, reminiscent of that held by ordinary language philosophers half a century ago. That other view, which I call ‘contextualism’, holds that speech acts are the primary bearers of content. Only in the context of a speech act does a sentence express a determinate content. Both literalism and contextualism come in many varieties. There are radical, and less radical, versions of both literalism and contextualism. Some intermediate positions are mixtures of literalism and contextualism.

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