Radical contextualism and open compositionality : a metatheoretical proposal

Pablo David Chávez Carvajal

doi:10.48204/2805-1815.8476

Submitted October 21, 2025

Published 2025-10-27

Artículos de investigación y ensayos filosóficos

No. 5 (2025): Analítica

Radical contextualism and open compositionality : a metatheoretical proposal

Pablo David Chávez Carvajal ⁺⁻

DOI https://doi.org/10.48204/2805-1815.8476

References

DOI: 10.48204/2805-1815.8476

Published: 2025-10-27

How to Cite

Chávez Carvajal , P. D. (2025) “Radical contextualism and open compositionality : a metatheoretical proposal”, Analítica, (5), pp. 120–135. doi: 10.48204/2805-1815.8476.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Abstract

In this paper, I explore the relationship between radical contextualism and compositionality. Radical contextualism is a family of theories defending that a sentence’s meaning in natural language is always invariant because it is too broad and unspecified to be otherwise and requires contextual adjustment. Compositionality is the idea that a sentence’s complex meaning comprises its parts. I shall evaluate whether radical contextualism benefits from including compositionality to explain linguistic meaning in natural language. Including compositionality might allow us to formalize aspects of radical contextualism and explain meaning-formation more precisely. I shall argue, nonetheless, that the classical notion of composition fails to account for the interpretation of sentence meaning in natural languages (as guided by a radical contextualist theory). An open compositionality scheme is crucial since I understand meaning-determination as a decision-making task. To explain how we understand sentences in natural language, open compositionality must be used to formulate a radical contextualist theory. I shall also offer a novel metatheory encompassing open compositionality and radical contextualism.

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References

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