Literalism and Contextualism Some Varieties文学与语境主义的一些品种.pdfVIP

Literalism and Contextualism: Some Varieties FRANÇOIS RECANATI According to the dominant position in the philosophy of language, we may legitimately ascribe truth-conditional content to sentences, independently of the speech act which the sentence is used to perform. This position, which I call Literalism, contrasts with another view, reminiscent of that held by ordinary language philosophers half a century ago. That other view, which I call ‘Contextualism’, holds that speech acts are the primary bearers of content. Only in the context of a speech act does a sentence express a determinate content.1 Both Literalism and Contextualism come in many varieties. There are radical, and less radical, versions of both Literalism and Contextualism. Some intermediate positions are mixtures of Literalism and Contextualism. In this paper I will describe several literalist positions, several contextualist positions, and a couple of intermediate positions. My aim is to convince the reader that the Literalism/Contextualism controversy is far from being settled. In the first section, I will look at the historical development of Literalism. We will see that this development reveals a gradual weakening. The question that naturally arises is: How far can we go in this direction? Where will this