Cognitive Environments and Conversational Tailoring

This brief paper is an elaboration on one section of Bezuidenhout (forthcoming).1 In the longer paper, I explore the relation between two conceptions of context, namely the psychologistic notion of a cognitive environment (CE) that belongs to the Relevance Theory (RT) framework and the formal notion of an index that belongs to the traditional Twentieth-century philosophy of language framework. The purpose of the longer paper is to argue that the RT notion is better able than the formal notion to handle some problem cases involving the use of indexicals that have been thought to put pressure on the formal notion of context. In order to make my case, I had to address the question as to the nature of and the constraints on CEs—that is, contexts in the RT sense. It is this section of the longer paper that I will focus on here, in the hopes that I can say a little more about the notion of “conversational tailoring” that is central to my account of how CEs are constrained.