Philosophy and Phenomenological Research

Volume 81, Issue 1, July 2010

Nellie Wieland
Pages 40-48

Context Sensitivity and Indirect Reports

In this paper, I argue that Contextualist theories of semantics are not undermined by their purported failure to explain the practice of indirect reporting. I adopt Cappelen & Lepore's test for context sensitivity to show that the scope of context sensitivity is much broader than Semantic Minimalists are willing to accept. The failure of their arguments turns on their insistence that the content of indirect reports is semantically minimal.