Liberating Content

This volume brings together two series of papers: one began with Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore's 1997 paper 'On an Alleged Connection Between the Theory of Meaning and Indirect Speech'. The other series started with their 1997 paper 'Varieties of Quotation'. The central theme throughout is that only when communicative content is liberated from semantic content will we make progress in understanding language, communication, contexts, and their interconnection. These are the papers in which Cappelen and Lepore introduced speech act pluralism and semantic minimalism, and they provide the foundation for one of the most powerful attacks on contextualism in contemporary philosophy.

Herman Cappelen is a professor of philosophy at the university of St Andrews, the Director of Arché Philosophical Research Centre, a Research Director at CSMN (Oslo), and the Editor-in-Chief of Inquiry. He is the author of six books: Insensitive Semantics (Blackwell, 2004; with E. Lepore), Language Turned on Itself (OUP, 2007; with E. Lepore), Relativism and Monadic Truth (OUP, 2009; with John Hawthorne), Philosophy without Intuitions (OUP, 2012), The Inessential Indexical (OUP, 2013; with Josh Dever), and Content and Communication: Contemporary Introductions in Philosophy and Language (forthcoming OUP 2016, co-authored with Josh Dever). Ernest Lepore is a Board of Governors professor of philosophy and Co-Director of Cognitive Science at Rutgers University. He is the author of numerous books and papers in the philosophy of language, philosophical logic, metaphysics and philosophy of mind, including Imagination and Convention (OUP, 2015) with Matthew Stone); Language Turned On Itself (OUP, 2007) and Insensitive Semantics (Blackwell, 2004), both of which are co-authored with Herman Cappelen; Donald Davidson: Meaning, Truth, Language, and Reality (OUP, 2005) and Donald Davidson's Truth-Theoretic Semantics (OUP, 2007), both with Kirk Ludwig; Meaning and Argument (Blackwell, 2000;2003; 2009); and, with Jerry Fodor, Holism: A Shopper's Guide (Blackwell, 1991) and The Compositionality Papers (OUP, 2002). He has edited several books, including The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language with Barry C. Smith (OUP, 2006).

- Introduction - Section One: The 'Alleged Connection'-Series - 1: On an alleged connection - 2: Insensitive quantifiers - 3: Indexicality, binding, anaphora and a priori truth - 4: Context shifting arguments - 5: Radial and moderate pragmatics - 6: A tall tale - 7: Shared content - 8: An abuse of context in semantics - 9: The creative interpreter - 10: Against assertion - Section Two: The 'Varieties of Quotation'-Series - 11: es of quotation - 12: Using, mentioning, and quoting - 13: Varieties of quotation revisited - 14: The heresy of paraphrase