At the beginning of chapter 6, I said that the debate between Literalism and Contextualism, which stood at the forefront of attention in the middle of the twentieth century, is widely, and wrongly, believed to have been settled in favour of (an attenuated version of) Literalism. My aim, in this book, has been to revive that debate, and to show that Contextualism is still a live option. By ‘Contextualism’ I mean the view according to which it is speech acts, not sentences, which have a determinate content and are truth-evaluable: sentences themselves express a determinate content only in the context of a speech act. In this concluding chapter I will summarize the discussion and deal with a few residual issues.

Alleged arguments against contextualism

First, I should say something of the philosophical arguments which, in the sixties, led to the demise of Contextualism. Two arguments, in particular, have been so generally taken to constitute a complete and final refutation of Contextualism, that I cannot close this book without saying what is wrong with them. One argument, due to Peter Geach, makes use of what he calls the ‘Frege point’. The other, due to Paul Grice, invokes a principle which he calls ‘Modified Occam's Razor’.

The Frege Point is the view that ‘a thought may have just the same content whether you assent to its truth or not; a proposition may occur in discourse now asserted, now unasserted, and yet be recognizably the same proposition’.