Central and East European
Society for Phenomenology

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235866

From contexts to circumstances of evaluation

is the trade-off always innocuous?

Mikhail Kissine

pp. 199-216

Abstract

Both context relativists and circumstance-of-evaluation relativists agree that the traditional semantic interpretation of some sentence-types fails to deliver the adequate truth-conditions for the corresponding tokens. But while the context relativists argue that the truth-conditions of each token depend on its context of utterance—each token being thus associated with a distinct intension—circumstance-of-evaluation relativists preserve a unique intension for all the tokens by placing circumstances of evaluations under the influence of a certain ‘point of view’. The main difference between the two approaches is that only the former can operate locally. It is shown that, for this reason, circumstance-of-evaluation relativism makes erroneous semantic predictions about (relative) gradable adjectives.

Publication details

Published in:

de Brabanter Philippe, Kissine Mikhail (2012) Semantic relativism. Synthese 184 (2).

Pages: 199-216

DOI: 10.1007/s11229-010-9732-4

Full citation:

Kissine Mikhail (2012) „From contexts to circumstances of evaluation: is the trade-off always innocuous?“. Synthese 184 (2), 199–216.