Radical Contextualism

Philosophers inspired by Wittgenstein have been waging a guerrilla war against compositional, truth-conditional semantics (CTCS) since the rise to dominance of that approach to the study of meaning in the early 1970s. The neo-Wittgensteinian resistance involves two elements: first, a focus on the way our assessment of the truth conditions of sentences changes in various, seemingly open-ended ways when features of the surrounding extra-linguistic context of utterance are varied; and second, the deployment of what is the philosophical equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction—Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule-following. Examples of seemingly openended contextual variation in truth conditions and the reflections on rule-following are meant to be mutually reinforcing: the rule-following considerations are supposed to give general reasons for thinking that all representations have content only in virtue of being caught up in extra-linguistic practices, institutions, indeed the whole human “whirl of organism” (Cavell, 1976), and the examples of contextual variation in truthconditions are meant to vividly illustrate the way that the content of representations depends on a seemingly open-ended range of background conditions. In the hands of the neo-Wittgensteinian radical contextualists, both of these kinds of argument are meant to challenge the central commitment of CTCS. That commitment can be summed up as follows: