Abstract

The assumption that sentence types encode proposition types was shaken by Donnellan’s

observation that a sentence with a definite description subject could express either a general

or a singular proposition. In other words, a single sentence type could have different truth

conditions on different occasions of use. Relevance Theory holds a strong version of this

“semantic underdeterminacy” thesis, according to which natural language sentences

standardly fall far short of encoding propositions or proposition types. The relevance-driven

pragmatic inferential mechanism is part of our “theory of mind” capacity and functions

independently of any code; it follows that linguistically encoded utterance meaning need be

only schematic.