Francois Recanati

In this paper I present an overview of my research in the philosophy of language in mind over more than thirty years, from my early work on speech act theory to my current work on mental files. The unifying theme is context-dependence,both in language and thought. I distinguish several varieties of context-dependence and, along the way, provide tentative accounts of various phenomena: performative utterances, indexicals, modulation (metonymy and loose talk, free enrichment), de se thought, the content of experiential states, and immunity to error through misidentification.

This book argues against the traditional understanding of the semantics/pragmatics divide and puts forward a radical alternative. Through half a dozen case studies, it shows that what an utterance says cannot be neatly separated from what the speaker means. In particular, the speaker's meaning endows words with senses that are tailored to the situation of utterance and depart from the conventional meanings carried by the words in isolation. This phenomenon of ‘pragmatic modulation’ must be taken into account in theorizing about semantic content, for it interacts with the grammar-driven process of semantic composition. Because of that interaction, the book argues, the content of a sentence always depends upon the context in which it is used. This claim defines Contextualism, a view which has attracted considerable attention in recent years, and of which the author of this book is one of the main proponents.