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Chapter 3 first elaborates on the view of context-sensitivity as a nontrivial context-shift-dependence. Drawing on Chapter 2, it makes explicit the fibration of semantic contents over contexts of utterance. The latter makes it natural to introduce a generic context and to identify linguistic meanings with the semantic contents attached to that context. The correspondence established between linguistic items and mathematical ones leads to the hypothesis that the fibration of contents over contexts constitutes a “stack” (with respect to a natural Grothendieck topology). This correspondence is the final reconsideration, proposed in the book, of Russell’s logical analysis. The rest of Chapter 3 distinguishes two different concepts of meaning (as obtained by collation or as transposable to more specific contexts) and thereby supports a constructive conciliation of minimalism, indexicalism, and contextualism. It also puts forward a new picture of the demarcation between semantic and pragmatic components, as well as a more flexible notion of compositionality. It finally develops various applications to philosophy of language and to cognitive linguistics.
In this book, Brice Halimi revives the connection between philosophy of language and philosophy of mathematics which founded analytic philosophy. Russell's logical analysis in The Principles of Mathematics aimed to identify the 'logical constants' of language with the 'indefinables' of mathematics. However context-sensitivity, which covers all the cases in natural language where the semantic content of an expression depends on the context of its utterance, is thought to hinder that program. In contrast, Halimi argues that context-sensitivity, approached as a radically dynamic process based on context-shift, is amenable to a mathematical counterpart, but that new mathematical concepts are needed. His approach leads to a renewed conception of semantic content, linguistic meaning, and their interaction, while also reconsidering the divide between semantics and pragmatics. The book will interest philosophers of language and philosophers of mathematics, and also has numerous applications to philosophy of mind, epistemology, logic, and linguistics.
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