Strawson: Contextualism

 Background
 Strawson’s contextualism is a reaction to misinterpretation.
 Confronted with this problem Strawson proposed an attractive threefold distinction regarding how context bears
on the meaning of a statement when a sentence is uttered.
 Context sentence utterance relationship.
 problem
 Assume that a certain sentence of a language (e.g. Shona) was seriously uttered on some occasion. 
 “Kana usina kubaiwa haukwiri Zupco bus, Kana usina kubaiwa hauwani basa”
 Assume further that Tsuro, the hearer, possesses only that much information, i.e. Tsuro knows that this sentence
was uttered but knows nothing about the identity of the speaker, or the nature or date of the occasion.
 Let us grant Tsuro full mastery of the syntax and semantics of the language (Shona) thus, Tsuro is assumed to
have ideally complete knowledge of Language (lexicon plus grammar).  
 The question is as follows, is there any sense in which Tsuro can be said to know the meaning of precisely what
was said on the occasion in question? “kana usina kubaiwa haukwiri Zupco bus, kana usina kubaiwa hauwani
basa”
 Solution

 Strawson's proposed scheme to investigate this problem by erecting three progressively richer senses of meaning
which he dubs sense-A-meaning, sense-B-meaning, and sense-C-meaning.
 Sense A Meaning
 According to Strawson, sense-A-meaning is linguistic meaning
 This has to do with correct translation, from one language to another language.
 Tsuro can give a correct translation from Shona to English iff he is told the possible lexical items or syntactical
constructions the utterer had in mind in uttering the statement.
 Speaker’s intended meaning.
 When sense-A-meaning is under consideration, Tsuro basically knows neither more nor less than he needs to
know in order to translate the sentence into English.
  Consider the following example, “The collapse of the bank took everyone by surprise."
 The designation of the word “bank" varies with different uses.(River Bank or CBZ)
 But once the intended designation is clarified, then the translation proceeds smoothly.
 
 Sense B Meaning
 One will learn the sense-B-meaning of a sentence if he has access to the references of proper names or indexicals
which may be contained in the sentence. (indexicals, (he, she, didn’t))
 He stood on his head since then
 If one additionally learns the reference of “he” (say Jacob) and “then”(since they year 2018) then one would have
a richer meaning.
 Sense C Meaning
 The complete meaning of the message.
 It is obtained by adding an illocutionary force (intonation) of what was said, together with a complete grasp of
how what was said is intended.
 Illocutionary force + intended meaning
 Consider the statement, “Don’t sign that contract yet”
 One needs to know whether this was issued as a request, command, instruction, or advice etc.