Philosophers on all sides of the contextualism debates have had an overly narrow conception of what semantic context sensitivity
could be. They have conflated context sensitivity (dependence of
truth or
extension on features of context) with indexicality (dependence of
content on features of context). As a result of this conflation, proponents of contextualism have taken arguments that establish
only context sensitivity to establish indexicality, while opponents of contextualism have taken arguments against indexicality
to be arguments against context sensitivity. Once these concepts are carefully pulled apart, it becomes clear that there is
conceptual space in semantic theory for
nonindexical forms of contextualism that have many advantages over the usual indexical forms.
Keywords Contextualism - Context sensitivity - Indexicality