A slugfest of intuitions: contextualism and experimental design

Evidence for contextualism primarily consists of intuitions generated in response to a variety of thought experiments. I argue that these intuitions are subject to experimenter bias and bias that results from exclusive reliance on absolute truth-value judgments. Unless these forms of experimental bias are controlled for, both contextualists and their opponents are attempting to give semantic and pragmatic explanations of what turn out to be mere experimental artifacts. I show how features of experimental design affect the intuitions generated by contextualist thought experiments and I improve contextualist methodology by developing modified versions of contextualist thought experiments that control for these forms of bias. 1. Contextualism and Experimental Design: An Overview “Contextualism” is the name for a family of semantic and pragmatic theories, all of which reject the following minimalist claim about the interaction of context and linguistic meaning: • Minimalism: The only effect that context has on the content of what is literally said by an utterance is that it determines the content of expressions in the “Basic Set” of obviously context-sensitive expressions (Cappelen and Lepore, 2005). That is, contextualism (in the most inclusive sense) is committed to the existence of unobvious forms of context-sensitivity. This is a descriptive claim—it is neutral between The phrase “slugfest of intuitions” comes from Berg (2002). 1 The “Basic Set” includes indexicals like “I”, “here”, and “today”, demonstratives like “you”, “she”, and “that”, and adjectives like “actual” and “present”. For the full list of items in the Basic Set, see Cappelen and Lepore (2005, p. 1).