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 contextualismAddresses broad and varied aspects of the distinction between the semantic and non-semantic content of languageDefends a distinctive and explanatorily powerful combination of semantic minimalism and speech act pluralismConfronts 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