Liberating Content

Abstract

This book brings together two series of papers: one began the authors' 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 the authors introduced speech act pluralism and semantic minimalism, and they provide the foundation for one of the most powerful attacks on contextualism in twentieth-century philosophy.