Insensitive Semantics: A Defense of Semantic Minimalism and Speech Act Pluralism

Insensitive Semantics is an overview of and contribution to the debates about how to accommodate context sensitivity within a theory of human communication, investigating the effects of context on communicative interaction and, as a corollary, what a context of utterance is and what it is to be in one.

• Provides detailed and wide-ranging overviews of the central positions and arguments surrounding contextualism

• Addresses broad and varied aspects of the distinction between the semantic and non-semantic content of language

• Defends a distinctive and explanatorily powerful combination of semantic minimalism and speech act pluralism

• Confronts core problems which not only run to the heart of philosophy of language and linguistics, but which arise in epistemology, metaphysics, and moral philosophy as well