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Gradable adjectives not only raise (now familiar) puzzles about discourse-oriented uses of context-sensitive expressions. They also constitute a principal source of vagueness. This chapter starts by examining various uses of gradable adjectives in communicating information and adjusting contextually operative standards. It is shown how to apply the Discourse Contextualist framework to capture these discourse dynamics, utilizing a particular contextualist interpretation of a standard degree semantics. Although standards-sensitivity isn’t sufficient for vagueness, the foregoing Discourse Contextualist semantics and pragmatics motivates an attractive account of various paradigmatic vagueness phenomena. Vagueness is diagnosed as a form of contextual indecision. The proposed treatment of context in vagueness phenomena—in particular, the sorites paradox and borderline cases—sheds light on general issues concerning the logic, semantics, and dynamics of vagueness. It provides the basis for a theory combining features many have thought incompatible: a classical semantics, and a non-epistemic treatment of vagueness. Issues concerning gradability and vagueness phenomena in language generally are briefly considered.

The third chapter develops a Discourse Contextualist account of discourse dynamics with epistemic modals. It is shown how distinctive discourse properties of epistemic modals can be derived from a particular contextualist interpretation of a standard semantics for modals, along with general principles of conversation and pragmatic reasoning. The proposed Discourse Contextualist account elucidates the multiple roles of epistemic modals in managing an evolving common ground, expressing speakers’ states of mind, and describing salient bodies of information. Particular attention is given to discourse agreement/disagreement, though various ways in which the use of epistemic modals affects and is affected by the discourse context, including in retraction and eavesdropper cases, are examined. Anaphoric and presuppositional properties of epistemic modals are also explored. The chapter concludes with methodological reflections on the semantic/metasemantic import of truth-value judgments, and the relation between semantic competence with epistemic modals and substantive epistemological theorizing.

This chapter develops a contextualist account of normative language, focusing on broadly normative readings of modal verbs. The account draws on a more general framework for implementing a contextualist semantics and pragmatics, Discourse Contextualism. The aim of Discourse Contextualism is to derive the discourse properties of normative language from a contextualist interpretation of an independently motivated formal semantics, along with principles of interpretation and conversation. In using normative language, interlocutors can exploit their grammatical and world knowledge, and general pragmatic reasoning skills, to manage an evolving system of norms. Discourse Contextualism provides a perspicuous framework for further philosophical theorizing about the nature of normativity, normative language, and normative judgment. Delineating these issues can help refine our understanding of the space of overall theories and motivate more fruitful ways the dialectics may proceed. Discourse Contextualism provides a linguistic basis for a more comprehensive theory of normativity and normative discourse and practice.

This chapter is an overview of the main line of argument of the book. The central thesis, labeled the autonomy of pragmatics, is that it is possible and fruitful to theorize about the structure and function of discourse independently of specific theory about the mechanisms that languages use to serve those functions. The thesis is defended by elaborating a notion of context as common ground; an evolving body of information about both the subject matter of the discourse, and about the discourse itself and the situation of the participants in the discourse. The notion of common ground is then used to explain some facts about the dynamics of discourse.

Chapter 2 begins an examination of discourse dynamics with CR-expressions, focusing in particular on epistemic modals. A standard version of the objection from discourse disagreement against contextualism is described. Several common strategies of reply are considered, but argued to be insufficient. As a way toward a more adequate solution, new cases are presented illustrating the same sort of distinctive discourse phenomena seen with CR-expressions as arising with paradigm context-sensitive expressions. The dialectical import of these cases is assessed, and corresponding challenges for relativism and contextualism are proposed. A more nuanced understanding of the role of context in interpretation and collaborative action motivates an improved framework for implementing a contextualist semantics and pragmatics. The basic structure of the account, called Discourse Contextualism, is outlined. Developing this account forms the task of the remainder of the book.

This chapter is about the relation between compositional structure and discourse dynamics, and their interaction in the explanation of linguistic phenomena. There is a general discussion of the kind of reasoning that plays a role in Paul Grice’s explanations of conversational implicature, and an argument that this kind of reasoning interacts with compositional processes, and plays a more pervasive role than is usually supposed in the explanation of both semantic and pragmatic facts. The notion of a subordinate or derived context is introduced, and used to help clarify one of the central linguistic problems about presupposition: the problem of presupposition projection.