Beyond pronouns and indexicals, utterance content often depends on context in subtle ways. "I'm hungry" means different things depending on who speaks; "That's tall" means different things for buildings versus people. Understanding when and how context determines content distinguishes semantic meaning from pragmatic content and reveals that understanding language requires extensive contextual knowledge.
You already know from indexicals and context-sensitivity that some expressions—"I," "here," "now," "this"—pick out different things depending on who utters them where and when. That was the straightforward case: the context-sensitivity is explicit, grammatically marked, and the shift in reference is systematic. This topic extends the phenomenon further. It turns out that a vast range of ordinary language is context-dependent in subtler ways, and sorting out *which* context-dependencies are semantic (built into the meaning of the word) versus pragmatic (inferred from the situation) is one of the central puzzles of philosophy of language.
Consider gradable adjectives like "tall," "flat," "empty," "ready." "That table is flat" means something different when said by a physicist checking for quantum tunneling versus a carpenter planning to set a glass on it. The word "flat" does not encode a single threshold; it encodes a comparison class and a standard of precision that the context supplies. Similarly, "The glass is empty" means empty of beer, not of air molecules; "She's ready" means ready for whatever the contextually relevant task is. These are not mere pragmatic implicatures—the truth conditions themselves shift with context. A table that is flat enough for the carpenter but not for the physicist is not both flat and not-flat in a contradictory sense; the contexts supply different standards, and both utterances can be true.
This creates a theoretical puzzle you know from the semantics/pragmatics boundary. One view—semantic minimalism—holds that the linguistically encoded content of a sentence is relatively thin and context-independent; all the "filling in" is pragmatic enrichment that does not affect the proposition expressed. The opposing view—contextualism—holds that what is said, not just what is implicated, varies with context, so the proposition expressed by "I'm hungry" genuinely differs depending on speaker, occasion, and conversational purpose. A middle position, indexicalism, tries to account for variability by positing hidden indexical elements in logical form—covert variables that work like "I" and "now" but are not phonologically realized.
The practical stakes are high. Legal interpretation depends on whether statutes mean what they minimally encode or what was contextually understood. Cross-cultural communication breaks down when speakers assume different background standards. Scientific communication requires extraordinary discipline to prevent context-sensitive terms from importing background assumptions. What emerges from this topic is that language is more thoroughly context-saturated than it naively appears, and the line between "what the sentence means" and "what the speaker meant by it" requires careful and often contentious drawing.
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