Contextualism as representationalism?

Abstract

This paper addresses a critique made a few years ago by Avner Baz of the work of current contextualists in the philosophy of language. Baz’s critique focuses on the idea that contextualists (especially Charles Travis) have misread the attack made by J. L. Austin and Wittgenstein on the so-called “prevailing conception of meaning”. Despite their insistence on the contextual factors determining the content of a statement, Baz contends that the contextualists still explain our utterances in terms of the truth-conditions of the sentences they express and, by emphasizing the referential dimension of words, they end up advocating a conception of meaning as a theoretical entity responsible for pointing out the objects of our discourse. Therefore, to Baz, they hold a representationalist view still closely connected to the traditional conception of meaning. Describing the foundation of Baz’s view, I argue in this paper that the connection he advocates between reference and a theory of meaning as representation is precisely the target of contextualists like Charles Travis. Their work is presented here as an attempt to explain the reference of words and the truth-conditions of a sentence after a radical negation of the notion of meaning as representation has been made. In that sense, contrary to what Baz affirms, they are closely connected to the spirit of the pioneers of Ordinary Language Philosophy.