On Occasion: Invisible Minimalism and the Pragmatic Frame

This paper compares Kent Bach’s peculiar version of semantic minimalism with the most radical form of contextualism in philosophy of language: Charles Travis’s occasion-sensitivity. Bach posits a distinction between a contextually insensitive semantic notion of what is said in an utterance and the pragmatically enriched content a speaker can communicate with it, whereas Travis refuses to isolate the content of what is said in an utterance from the act of uttering it. I will argue that Bach’s content dualism fails precisely as a result of its willingness to ascribe “pure semantic content” to an entity that is structurally pragmatic.