Essays on linguistic context-sensitivity and its philosophical significance

A sentence is context-sensitive if the content expressed through uttering it may vary from occasion to occasion even as the sentence's standing meaning in the language remains fixed. This thesis examines context-sensitivity's significance for several philosophical problems.;Chapter I distinguishes context-sensitivity from other sources of content underdetermination, argues that it's a pervasive feature of natural languages, and, to help explain this pervasiveness, examines the benefits it bestows. Chapter II examines a variety of criteria for context individuation, with an eye towards identifying the various theoretical projects for which they would be appropriate.;Chapter III examines the difficulty truth-theoretic accounts of semantic competence have in accommodating certain sorts of predicate context-sensitivity. I consider a variety of accommodation strategies: some deny the presence of context-sensitivity, others modify the "normal form" of the T-sentences stating the truth conditions for context-sensitive sentences, still others allow the truth-theory itself to be context-sensitive.;Chapter IV enters a plea for a neglected approach to vagueness and the sorites paradox. I argue first that it is a condition on the expression of a proposition that the speaker may coherently presuppose that (or, act as if) the uttered predicates, as used on that occasion, partition the contextually relevant domain of discourse; and second that consideration of the sorites paradox leads to a violation of this condition. Among the attractions of this approach is that it provides a motivated solution to the sorites, one that moreover avoids those offenses to common sense characteristic of its competitors.;Finally, Chapter V considers whether adverting to context-sensitivity might help clarify the charge that some ontological questions are in some sense unintelligible. I suggest that there is a built-in limit to the probative force with which a charge adverting to context-sensitivity could be entered. The limit arises from the fact that the very terms needed to enter the charge are themselves context-sensitive. I close by showing how Quine's views on ontology can in fact be construed as sympathetic to the unintelligibility charge.