Prudent Semantics Meets Wanton Speech Act Pluralism

Abstract

Abstract A cautious semanticist will be as minimalist as she can. A minimal theory is lean, clean, and easy to comprehend and implement. Each new parameter we introduce into the theory diminishes these virtues, complicating the lexicon and increasing the theory’s computational burden. By these measures of virtue, Cappelen and Lepore’s semantic theory verges on the saintly. They maintain that only a highly restricted class of expressions, like ‘‘I’’, ‘‘today’’, ‘‘this’’, ‘‘actual’’, and ‘‘local’’, are context-sensitive; they claim that all other expressions, including ‘‘every’’, ‘‘tall’’, and ‘‘good’’, which are widely believed to be context-sensitive, make the same contribution to every sentence in which they occur.