• cognitive pragmatics
• semantic underdetermination
• semantic minimalism
• contextualism
• semantics
• pragmatics

Semantic Minimalism is a recent attempt in philosophy to defend traditional formal approaches to the study of linguistic meaning. On traditional formal semantic approaches, words have fixed, stable and context independent meanings, the meaning of a sentence arises from the composition of the meanings of the constituent parts, and it determines a set of conditions such that the sentence is true if and only if those conditions are met. According to an alternative view – Contextualism – part of these assumptions is untenable. In particular, as John Searle put it at the end of the seventies, the literal meaning of a sentence – presumably any sentence – can only have ‘application’ relative to a background of contextual and social assumptions. It can enter into semantic relations (synonymy, entailment, etc.) with other sentences only with respect to a background of language-independent assumptions. In this thesis I try to argue for Semantic Minimalism and against Contextualism. Inspired by some of the arguments put forward by Semantic Minimalism (especially, by Emma Borg’s Minimal Semantics), and trying to remove what I take to be misleading in it (especially, in the version of Semantic Minimalism provided by Cappelen and Lepore), I argue that Semantic Minimalism has a response to offer to both the main charges of Contextualism: the underdetermination objection (i.e., the thought that literal linguistic meaning alone does not suffice to determine truth-conditions) and the cognitive objection (i.e., the claim that literal semantic propositions or truth-conditions need not be entertained by the hearer who is engaged in the cognitive process of utterance understanding, hence resulting psychologically redundant and irrelevant). In conclusion, after having shown that sentences have background-independent literal truth-conditional meanings and that such meanings, to a certain extent, tend to be actually entertained during concrete conversational exchanges, I will end by emphasizing some of the questions about language and the puzzles about thought that still remain after my defense of Semantic Minimalism.