Literal Meaning

François Recanati provides an original defense of "contextualism" in contribution to the current debate about the best definition of semantics and pragmatics. Is "What is said" determined by linguistic conventions, or is it an aspect of "speaker's meaning"? Do we need pragmatics to fix truth-conditions? What is "literal meaning"? To what extent is semantic composition a creative process? How pervasive is context-sensitivity? Recanati offers an informed survey of the spectrum of positions held by linguists and philosophers working at the semantics/pragmatics interface.