Context and Interpretation

In this article, three shortcomings of parameter-based contextualist and relativist accounts of linguistic context dependence are laid out and then an alternative approach is sketched in which context is based on the assumptions of individual agents. First, context does not determine semantic values, but discourse participants do so when they interpret an utterance. Second, a fruitful notion of context must account for more than the mere variability of extensions from assessor to assessor. And finally, the standard two-dimensional apparatus has technical limitations that make it unsuitable for expressing fine-grained models of contexts. Instead of modeling contexts as complex parameters, contexts should, following Stalnaker, be regarded as sets of interpretative assumptions. Interpretation can then be taken as an inferential process on the basis of such assumptions. In a given interpretation situation, these assumptions may be generated by revising an agent’s beliefs by his second-order beliefs about what the speaker believes.