The paper is primarily concerned with laying out the space of positions that purport to account for semantic context sensitivity
of natural language expressions and with making a prima facie case for relativism. I start with distinguishing between pre-semantic,
semantic and post-semantic context sensitivity. In the following section I briefly present the classic picture of indexicals
due to David Kaplan and assess some arguments for the introduction of certain parameters in the circumstances of evaluation
(specifically, time). In section III I envisage two views that purport to expand semantic context sensitivity beyond expressions
from “the basic set”: indexicalism and contextualism. In section IV, by means of an example taken from John Perry, I draw
attention to a specific form of semantic context sensitivity, namely that in which what is affected by context are the circumstances
of evaluation of utterances rather than their content. The example leads to the necessity of distinguishing between two roles
of context: a content-determinative one and a circumstance-determinative one. In section V I introduce relativism as the view
incorporating the claim that context has a circumstance-determinative role and contrast it with the two views presented before.
In the final section I analyze a certain type of argument usually adduced in favor of contextualism (the so-called “context-shifting
arguments”) and show that in order to work it has to rule out relativism. I conclude by claiming that the battle must be fought
by giving arguments to the effect that a certain parameter should or should not be part of the circumstances of evaluation
rather than the content of utterances.