Francois Recanati provides an original defense of "contextualism" in contribution to the current debate about the best definition of semantics and pragmatics. Is "What is said" determined by linguistic conventions, or is it an aspect of "speaker's meaning"? Do we need pragmatics to fix truth-conditions? What is "literal meaning"? To what extent is semantic composition a creative process? How pervasive is context-sensitivity? Recanati offers an informed survey of the spectrum of positions held by linguists and philosophers working at the semantics/pragmatics interface.

Francois Recanati provides an original defense of "contextualism" in contribution to the current debate about the best definition of semantics and pragmatics. Is "What is said" determined by linguistic conventions, or is it an aspect of "speaker's meaning"? Do we need pragmatics to fix truth-conditions? What is "literal meaning"? To what extent is semantic composition a creative process? How pervasive is context-sensitivity? Recanati offers an informed survey of the spectrum of positions held by linguists and philosophers working at the semantics/pragmatics interface.

This volume puts forward a distinct new theory of direct reference, blending insights from both the Fregean and the Russellian traditions, and fitting the general theory of language understanding used by those working on the pragmatics of natural language

Our thought and talk are situated. They do not take place in a vacuum but always in a context, and they always concern an external situation relative to which they are to be evaluated. Since that is so, Francois Recanati argues, our linguistic and mental representations alike must be assigned two layers of content: the explicit content, or lekton, is relative and perspectival, while the complete content, which is absolute, involves contextual factors in addition to what is explicitly represented. Far from reducing to the context-independent meaning of the sentence-type or, in the...

Our thought and talk are situated. They do not take place in a vacuum but always in a context, and they always concern an external situation relative to which they are to be evaluated. Since that is so, Francois Recanati argues, our linguistic and mental representations alike must be assigned two layers of content: the explicit content, or lekton, is relative and perspectival, while the complete content, which is absolute, involves contextual factors in addition to what is explicitly represented. Far from reducing to the context-independent meaning of the sentence-type or, in the...

Francois Recanati argues against the traditional understanding of the semantics/pragmatics divide and puts forward a radical alternative. Through half a dozen case studies, he shows that what an utterance says cannot be neatly separated from what the speaker means. In particular, the speaker's meaning endows words with senses that are tailored to the situation of utterance and depart from the conventional meanings carried by the words in isolation. This phenomenon of 'pragmatic modulation' must be taken into account in theorizing about semantic content, for it interacts with the...

Francois Recanati presents his theory of mental files, a new way of understanding reference in language and thought. He aims to recast the "nondescriptivist" approach to reference that has dominated the philosophy of language and mind in the late twentieth century. According to Recanati, we refer through mental files, which play the role of so-called "modes of presentation." The reference of linguistic expressions is inherited from that of the files we associate with them. The reference of a file is determined relationally, not satisfactionally: so a file is not to be equated to the body of...

Immunity to error through misidentification is recognised as an important feature of certain kinds of first-person judgments, as well as arguably being a feature of other indexical or demonstrative judgments. In this collection of newly commissioned essays, the contributors present a variety of approaches to it, engaging with historical and empirical aspects of the subject as well as contemporary philosophical work. It is the first collection of essays devoted exclusively to the topic and will be essential reading for anyone interested in philosophical work on the self, first-person thought...