Context and Content: Essays on Intentionality in Speech and Thought

First, speech is action, and speech acts should be understood in terms of the way they are intended to affect the situation in which they are performed. Second, speech acts are context-dependent: their contents (and so the way they are intended to affect the situation) depend not only on the syntactic and semantic properties of the types of expressions used, but also on facts about the situation in which the expres- sions are used. These two simple observations point to two different roles that context plays: it is both the object on which speech acts act and the source of the information relative to which speech acts are interpreted. To explain the interaction of the two roles, we need a single conception of context that will represent the information about the situation that is relevant both to the role of context in determining content and to explaining how the content determined then acts on the situation. The point of a dis- course at least one central kind of discourse is the exchange of information. Participants in a conversation begin with certain information in common, or presumed to be in common, and it is that body of information that the speech acts they perform are designed to influence. The content of an assertion will be a piece of information, and if the assertion is successful, then that information will become part of the body of information that provides the context for the subsequent discourse. So both of the roles that contexts play require that they include a body of information: context-dependence means dependence on certain facts, but the facts must be available, or presumed to be available, to the partici- pants in the conversation. So I propose to identify a context (at a particular point in a discourse) with the body of information that is presumed, at that point, to be common to the participants in the discourse.

The world, as Wittgenstein said, is all that is the case, and a possible world is all that would be the case if that world were actual. Every proposition, relevant or not, that is taken for granted by the participants in a conversation will be true in all of the possible worlds that define the context. Since speakers in the actual world take for granted when they are talking that they are talking, they will be talking not only in the actual world, but also in each of the possible worlds that define their context. Within each possible world in the context set, a discourse is taking place, and it has a context represented by its own context set. (Representing Contexts, 99)

The context-what is presupposed in it-is con- stantly changing as things are said. The point of a speech act an asser- tion, for example is to change the context, and since the way the speech act is supposed to change the context depends on its content, interpreta- tion must be done in the prior context-the context as it is before the assertion is accepted, and its content added to what is presupposed. But the prior context cannot be the context as it was before the speaker began to speak.