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Saarbrücken

Certain context-dependent phenomena, in particular anaphora and
presuppositions, modals and conditionals, have been taken to require a
major shift in the conception of meaning, so that sentences or their
utterances are not taken to stand for truth conditionally complete
propositions, but rather for operations on presuppositional contexts
(information states). I will argue that the phenomena motivate indeed a
notion of content that is truthconditionally incomplete (and not only for
(utterances of) sentences, but also prppositional attitudes) with a context
playing a completing role (and not only as a presuppositional context, but
also as an attitudinal background, a background situation, or the
information given by the temporally preceding part of the sentence).
However, this does not require and in fact should not lead to the dynamic
semantic move on which sentence meanings are conceived as context change
potentials. Rather, sentences should be assigned static structured meanings
that are context-independent, but allow for a separate formulation of truth

and appropriateness conditions that take the context into account (where
the context may be presuppositional, attitudinal, sentential or a
background situation).

Werner Saurer

302-4177

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