Insensitive Semantics

"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. This work: provides detailed and wide-ranging overviews of the central positions and arguments surrounding contextualism; addresses broad and varied aspects of the distinction between the semantic and non-semantic content of language; defends a distinctive and explanatorily powerful combination of semantic minimalism and speech act pluralism; and, confronts 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.