Contextualism vs Minimalism in Semantics

Contextualism is the main opponent of minimalism. The debate between these two semantical approaches, stem in an old fashion dispute to determine the border between semantics and pragmatics. Contextualists claim that the sentences in the natural language are not truth-evaluable before being enriched pragmatically. In contrast, in minimalists’ viewpoint, there is a minimal semantic content that provides the truth-evaluable meaning of sentences in a way that context of utterance has limited effects on it. This contrast is based on the way and extent to which context affects semantic content. In this paper, after introducing these two approaches, the main arguments of contextualists against minimalist are discussed, then we show that minimalistic semantics like Kaplan's LD with objective interpretation of context cannot present any proper model even for sentences containing first-person reference, and on the basis of a subjective interpretation of context, the indexical/non-indexical distinction is not clear and other expressions of natural languages can be indexical, in a broad sense.