Abstract
Three accounts relating meaning and context are compared: a classical or static one as proposed by Stalnaker, a contextual or dynamic one as proposed in Dynamic Semantics, and a massively contextual one, defended here. On the last view, meaning and interpretation is a matter of a change of an epistemic context by means of an inductive inference, thus of pragmatics. As in dynamic semantics, meaning is a matter of epistemic state change. But now it is construed normatively, and it is the contextual change that explicates meaning, not meaning that explicates why a context changes in the way it does. Meaning is contextual on this approach because the justification of inductive inferences depends on contextual parameters (such as a partition of answers, or a degree of caution with respect to the risk of incurring error, etc.) for whose assessment no objective standards can be given. Contextuality is not a feature of language per se, and questions of contextual change are not primarily linguistic ones.
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© 1999 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Hinzen, W. (1999). Contextual Dependence and the Epistemic Foundations of Dynamic Semantics. In: Bouquet, P., Benerecetti, M., Serafini, L., Brézillon, P., Castellani, F. (eds) Modeling and Using Context. CONTEXT 1999. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 1688. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48315-2_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-48315-2_15
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