Review Minimal Semantics

As the title of her book indicates, Emma Borg is a minimalist with regard to semantics and, like many minimalists, sees herself as defending her patch from the encroachments of the ‘contextualist hoards’. She is, therefore, taking up a particular position within what is seen by many philosophers of language as a foundational debate concerning the true bearers of semantic (truth-conditional) content. According to the minimalist (or ‘literalist’), natural language sentences represent the world as being a certain way and are true or false depending on how the world is. The contextualist maintains that this is a category mistake, that it is utterances or speech acts that have such content and, whatever semantic properties sentences have, it is only in conjunction with the non-linguistic information in contexts of utterance that they eventuate in truth-conditional content. In other words, minimalists believe that there is a formally-driven, pragmatics-free level of semantic content, while contextualists believe that there is no level of semantic content without quite extensive pragmatic input. Viewed this way it certainly sounds like a substantive debate. However, there is another way of looking at the territory which makes the difference in the positions seem rather less momentous. Most of the current players in the debate, whether minimalist or contextualist, agree that there are three kinds or levels of meaning involved in verbal communication: linguistic expression-type meaning, what the speaker said, and what the speaker implicated. The latter two are pragmatic kinds of meaning, though ‘what is said’ is significantly shaped by linguistic meaning, and both are, of course, fully truthconditional. Given a clear distinction between sentence-type meaning and what is said, which