Contextualism, minimalism, and situationalism

Abstract

After discussing some difficulties that contextualism and minimalism face, this paper presents a new account of the linguistic exploitation of context, situationalism. Unlike the former accounts, situationalism captures the idea that the main intuitions underlying the debate concern not the identity of propositions expressed but rather how truth-values are situation-dependent. The truth-value of an utterance depends on the situation in which the proposition expressed is evaluated. Hence, like in minimalism, the proposition expressed can be truth-evaluable without being enriched or expanded. Along with contextualism, it is argued that an utterance’s truth-value is context dependent. But, unlike contextualism and minimalism, situationalism embraces a form of relativism in so far as it maintains that semantic content must be evaluated vis-à-vis a given situation and, therefore, that a proposition cannot be said to be true/false eternally.

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