Vol. 37 Nro. 2 (2017)
Critical Notes

Are Contextualism and Relativism a Challenge or an Improvement of Fregean Semantics? About Eleonora Orlando's Significados en contexto y verdad relativa

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  • Eduardo García-Ramírez
DOI: https://doi.org/10.36446/af.2017.68

Published 2017-11-01

Keywords

  • Compositionality,
  • Content,
  • Truth-Conditions
  • Composicionalidad,
  • Contenido,
  • Condiciones de verdad
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Abstract

In her recent book (Orlando 2015), Eleonora Orlando presents us with a provocative proposal intended to question the success of the Fregean tradition in philosophy of language by following contextualist and relativist arguments. This book is a valuable contribution to contemporary philosophy of language. It is a must read for anyone who is interested in understanding the state of the art in this discipline. Furthermore, the great variety of texts and philosophical views it presents constitute, in and of themselves, valuable, and sometimes controversial, contributions to the actual debate. Thus explaining why this book is also an extraordinary invitation to continue that century old tradition about the Fregean view of language, and particularly the possibility that contextualism (and relativism) constitute a convenient improvement. In this paper I want to offer a critical study of this book, more specifically, I want to focus on its challenge to Fregean semantics. To do so I will discuss its anti-fregean arguments in detail in order to cast doubt over the claim that the views defended are truly incompatible with Frege’s spirit or if, as I suspect, they are fully compatible with it.

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