Understanding, Context-Relativity, And The Description Theory

According to the view I defend in this paper, there is a common answer to be given to both (a) and (b). In this paper, I respond to what I take to be the strongest argument against this view. But before I give the view, the argument against it, and the response, I need to say more about the questions. The purpose of a semantic theory is to derive the truth-conditions of whole sentences from the references of their lexical items. Thus, a semantic theory presupposes a pairing of lexical items with their references. For each such pairing, such as the (grossly over-simplified) pairing in (1), two extra-semantical, or metasemantical (cf. Kaplan 1989: 574), questions arise.