Varieties of Minimalist Semantics

Cappelen and Lepore (C&L) view themselves as embattled defenders of the Free Republic of Semantics from the attacks of its enemies, mostly in the form of pragmatic incursions. They withdraw to a limited territory, and defend it with reason, humor, and other less noble weapons. The enemies are everywhere. This way of posing the debates is often humorous and helps make the book easy to read. It also often leads the authors to caricaturize and to trivialize many of the problems, arguments and positions held by the different parties. Here is a curious pair of facts. C&L think that the vast majority of philosophers and linguists who have written on the matter are contextualists. Francis Recanati (2004), an admitted and unapologetic contextualist, thinks that most philosophers and linguists are literal ists. One might wonder if the terms of the debate are distorting rather than clarifying things. We not only wonder it, we think it.