François Recanati , Literal Meaning , Cambridge : Cambridge University

Contrary to a certain traditional conception dating back at least to Locke, everyday linguistic communication is not a simple matter of putting one's thoughts into words for one's audience to put back into thoughts. This naive " code model " misses the fact that what a speaker means in uttering a sentence can be distinct in various ways from what the sentence means. She might not mean what she says (mainly determined by what the sentence means) but mean something else instead; or, she might mean that but mean something else as well. This is old news. In recent years philosophers and linguists have become increasingly aware of more subtle ways in which speaker meaning can depart from sentence meaning and are dubious about how well these diverse phenomena fit into familiar categories. François Recanati for one has forcefully argued that these categories need overhauling. Literal Meaning integrates his extensive earlier work into a systematic challenge to the very idea of literal meaning, at least as traditionally conceived, and the result is a vigorous manifesto for semantic contextualism. Recanati is particularly impressed by two pervasive facts about everyday communication. First, the linguistic meanings of sentences, at least those short enough to be suitable for casual conversation, are impoverished relative to what speakers mean in using them. For example, you might utter " I've had nothing to drink " but mean (and be taken to mean) that you've had nothing to drink that evening. What you mean is an expanded version of the sentence's semantic content and is identified by a process of " free enrichment, " free (or " optional ") because the sentence already expresses a proposition, not the one you mean but merely a " minimal " proposition. Indeed, a sentence may fail to express a proposition at all, even modulo indexicality. Thanks to a missing argument, polysemy, or lexical or phrasal underdetermination, many sentences are not truth-evaluable as they stand, and what the speaker means can't be just what the sentence means. So, for example, if you utter " I haven't finished dessert, " you could mean that you haven't finished eating it or that you haven't finished preparing it, but not that you haven't finished it, period. When a sentence is semantically incomplete in this way, what the speaker means is identified by a " mandatory " process of " saturation. "-2-Recanati is also impressed by …