ABSTRACT
Recanati challenges what he characterizes as the Fregean conception of meaning, resorting to cases of semantic variability proposed by Searle and Travis. According to him, truth-conditional pragmatics - a position that settles the influence of context over conventional meanings under the frame of pragmatic functions - accommodates better those cases to the objective of providing a systematic truth-conditional theory of meaning. In contrast with this approach, he characterizes radical contextualism as the position according to which the phenomenon of semantic variability is persistent and incompatible with the postulation of literal meanings. According to him, to the extent that radical contextualism is contrary to the postulation of literal meanings, it is also incompatible with the postulation of Fregean senses. That view is so antagonistic to the neo-Fregean conception of Fregean senses that it deserves to be revised.
Keywords
indexicalism; truth-conditional pragmatism; radical contextualism; neo-fregeanism