The truth of an utterance generally depends on what the words uttered mean and what is the current state of the world; but also on the context of the utterance. Within formal semantics this was first accounted for. by Kaplan, by means of explicating meanings as functions from contexts to intensions. Stainaker then brought the attention to the fact that utteraces not only ‘consume’ contexts but also ‘produce’ new ones; and that context is thus what mediates the interplay between subsequent utterances. In this paper we point out that context can be considered either from the viewpoint of the information it contains (which delimits what can be subsequently consistently claimed), or from the viewpoint of individuals which it contains (which determines what can be subsequently succesfully anaphorically referred to). We discuss the possibilities of explicating contexts within the framework of formal semantics and we also discuss the question to which extent contexts belong to semantics.
Inferentialism, as presented by Robert Brandom, is first and foremost a view of the nature of meaning: it is the view that meaning is fundamentally the role which an expression acquires by becoming governed by the rules of our language games. (Hence it is a certain kind of “use theory of meaning” familiar from post-Wittgensteinian discussions; according to inferentialism, however, meaning is not given by actual use, but rather by the rules of correct use.) In this text we attempt to draw very general consequences from this approach (consequences that go beyond what is to be found in the work of R. Brandom). We claim that meaning is generally a certain form of “entanglement” in a certain kind of human practice that is built up from the much more primitive building blocks of human abilities that enable us to adopt normative attitudes and, in general, to accept rules. And it is just these human abilities which have shifted us humans onto the evolutionary trajectory on which we are now proceeding and on which we are quickly leaving behind other kinds of animals. It is precisely this ability which has led to our becoming the only animal species which has supplemented standard biological evolution with a kind of evolution that we might call cultural, and which is incomparably faster and more effective.