Abstract
This article is a continuation of a line of investigation I began in ‘Literal Meaning’.1 Its aim is to explore some of the relations between the meaning of words and sentences and the context of their utterance. The view I shall be challenging is sometimes put by saying that the meaning of a sentence is the meaning that it has independently of any context whatever — the meaning it has in the so-called „null context“. The view I shall be espousing is that in general the meaning of a sentence only has application (it only, for example, determines a set of truth conditions) against a background of assumptions and practices that are not representable as a part of the meaning.
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Notes
Erkenntnis 13 (1978), pp. 207–224, reprinted in J. R. Searle, Expression and Meaning, Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Philosophical Grammar, Blackwell, Oxford, 1974, p. 338.
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© 1980 D. Reidel Publishing Company
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Searle, J.R. (1980). The Background of Meaning. In: Searle, J.R., Kiefer, F., Bierwisch, M. (eds) Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics. Texts and Studies in Linguistics and Philosophy, vol 10. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-8964-1_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-8964-1_10
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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