Since the end of the nineteenth century, philosophy of language has been plagued by an extensive and notoriously confusing literature on how to draw the distinction between semantic and non-semantic content. This debate, at its deepest level, is about how to accommodate context sensitivity within a theory of human communication.


Insensitive Semantics is a book about this debate, investigating the effects of context on communicative interaction and, as a corollary, what a context of utterance is and what it is to be in one. To this end, the authors defend a combination of two views: semantic minimalismandspeech act pluralism. If these views are right, then many philosophers and linguists are guilty of some profound mistakes, with wide-ranging implications for philosophy of language but also epistemology, metaphysics, moral philosophy, and other branches of pilosophy.