Authors:	Beyer, Christian
Title:	Meaning, context, and background
Online publication date:	11-Nov-2016
Year of first publication:	2015
Language:	english
Abstract:	It is widely held that (truth-conditional) meaning is context-dependent. According to John Searle's radical version of contextualism, the very notion of meaning “is only applicable relative to a set of […] background assumptions” (Searle 1978, p. 207), or background know-how. In earlier work, I have developed a (moderately externalist) “neo-Husserlian” account of the context-dependence of meaning and intentional content, based on Husserl’s semantics of indexicals. Starting from this semantics, which strongly resembles today's mainstream semantics (section 2) I describe the (radical) contextualist challenge that mainstream semantics and pragmatics face in view of the (re-)discovery of what Searle calls the background of meaning (section 3). Following this, and drawing upon both my own neo-Husserlian account and ideas from Emma Borg, Gareth Evans and Timothy Williamson, I sketch a strategy for meeting this challenge (section 4) and draw a social-epistemological picture that allows us to characterize meaning and content in a way that takes account of contextualist insights yet makes it necessary to tone down Searle's “hypothesis of the Background” (section 5).
DDC:	100 Philosophie 100 Philosophy
Institution:	Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
Department:	FB 05 Philosophie und Philologie
Place:	Mainz
ROR:	https://ror.org/023b0x485
DOI:	http://doi.org/10.25358/openscience-438
URN:	urn:nbn:de:hebis:77-publ-551531
Version:	Published version
Publication type:	Buchbeitrag
License:	In Copyright
Information on rights of use:	https://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Citation:	Open MIND Metzinger, Thomas
Pages or article number:	Kap. 4(T)
Publisher:	MIND Group
Publisher place:	Frankfurt am Main
Issue date:	2015
Publisher URL:	http://dx.doi.org/10.15502/9783958570221
Publisher DOI:	10.15502/9783958570221
Appears in collections:	JGU-Publikationen