Atlas (2007) argues that semantic minimalism (as defended by Cappelen & Lepore 2005) fails because it cannot deal with semantic non-specificity. I argue that there is a plausible version of minimalism—viz., situated minimalism—which doesn’t succumb to the non-specificity charge insofar as non-specificity can be dealt with at a postsemantic level. Thus, pragmatics plays no role when it comes to ...

In this paper, we put forward a position we call “situationalism” (or “situated minimalism”), which is a middle-ground view between minimalism and contextualism in recent philosophy of language. We focus on the notion of free enrichment, which first arose within contextualism as underlying the claim that what is said is typically enriched relative to the logical form of the uttered sentence. Ho...

Minimalism is a concept used in many different literatures ranging from arts to mathematics. Developing a notion of minimalism for human-computer interaction and applying this notion to the products and processes of usability engineering efforts yields an alternative viewpoint. Minimalism lays ultimate value on freedom for the user; the interface grows through reduction. This attitude is inhere...

Minimalism is our name for the dominant liberal perspective on public policy implementation in contemporary legal scholarship. Minimalism emphasizes public interventions that incorporate market concepts and practices and that centralize and minimize administrative discretion. This essay appraises Minimalism in relation to a competing liberal view of the administrative state. Experimentalism emp...

All of the semantic minimalists come together in seeking to reduce contextual inputs in semantics to a minimum, but they disagree over what this quantity may be, and more specifically, the extent to which something can still be classed as “minimal”. With this issue increasingly addressed, three versions of semantic minimalism can be identified: weak, strong, and radical. They are still gathered...

If you think that semantic minimalism is the only alternative to contextualism but you’d rather do without Cappelen and Lepore’s mysteriously minimal “propositions,” you can. You just have to recognize that being semantically incomplete does not make a sentence context-sensitive. You don’t have to go through the ritual of repeatedly incanting things like this: “John is ready” expresses the prop...