| This dissertation mounts a sustained attack against traditional notions of objective utterance content in analytic philosophy of language, and proposes a new theory of utterance content, Hermeneutic Contextualism, which emphasizes the interpreter-sensitive aspects of meaning.;The dissertation is organized around two major case studies: (1) The first case study addresses allegedly "fringe" phenomena in natural language use, focusing on metaphors and malaprops. Donald Davidson's famous analyses of such utterances suggest radical conclusions -- e.g., that non-literal utterances carry only literal meanings, and that conventions do not play a crucial role in language -- which many of his followers have recoiled from. I defend Davidson's conclusions, showing how they are more plausible than they initially seem; for they explain the constrained context-sensitivity which we observe in common patterns of paraphrasing, affirming, and denying figurative utterances. However, Davidson's original views do suffer from critical and previously unrecognized internal inconsistencies. I present Hermeneutic Contextualism as a friendly amendment to his position, resolving its internal problems while maintaining its key insights. (2) The second case study addresses the semantics of knowledge attributions. I show that our truth-assessments of a knowledge attribution legitimately vary depending upon our interpretive context: different ascriptions of truth-conditional content to a single utterance are acceptable on different occasions of assessment. I begin by reviewing the debates between Invariantists, Contextualists, and Truth-Relativists in epistemology. I then introduce new examples of context-sensitivity which suggest that speakers whose utterances are challenged have more flexibility than these debates acknowledge -- as only Hermeneutic Contextualism predicts. HC provides an analytic version of the hermeneutic approach to meaning, extending the best aspects of Contextualism and Relativism by encouraging us to understand content as being more like an appearance of an utterance than an intrinsic property.;I conclude by sketching how Hermeneutic Contextualism is part of a broader movement towards a theoretical position that dispenses with the traditional Semanticist notion of "literal meaning" entirely. I suggest that this notion be replaced with a more cognitively realistic and explanatorily useful model of distributed meaning, one that takes ubiquitous phenomena of context-sensitivity and indeterminacy as fundamental rather than exceptional. |
