An Externalist and Contextualist Account of Copredication
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Abstract
I maintain that polysemy is a contextual phenomenon, but that the nature of the context-dependence of polysemy has been misunderstood, a fact which is brought out by the especially difficult case of copredication. In this paper, I offer a truth-conditional semantics that can accommodate copredicative sentences, in which polysemous terms are being used in more than one sense, and thus have more than one extension simultaneously. I argue, further, that my account is compatible with externalism, which is significant because the existence of polysemy is often thought to pose a problem for externalism. Context is required to play an important role in this semantics, which, as I will show, is substantially different from accounts currently on the market.
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