The speaker authority problem for context-sensitivity (or: you can’t always mean what you want) ∗ Karen S. Lewis Barnard College, Columbia University Department of Philosophy It is uncontroversial that many expressions in natural language are context- sensitive, in the sense that the very same words can be used to (primarily) convey different meanings in different contexts. The classic examples are indexicals like ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘today’, ‘now’, etc. and demonstratives like ‘this’, ‘that’ etc., but the sort of expressions I have in mind are (but not limited to) things like gradable adjectives (e.g. ‘tall’, ‘heavy’, ‘rich’, ‘boring’...), color adjectives (e.g. ‘green’, ‘red’, ‘blue’...), quantifiers (e.g. ‘every bottle’, ‘many students’...), meteorological predicates (‘rain- ing’, ‘snowing’, ‘humid’...), relational expressions (e.g. ‘enemy’, ‘local’, ‘coming’, ‘going’, ‘on the left’...), possessives (e.g. ‘Claudia’s art’, ‘Stacey’s candy’...), and (if contextualism is right for the following expressions) epistemic modals, knowledge claims, and predicates of taste. It is considerably more controversial to say that many expressions such as these exhibit a semantic context-sensitivity, in the sense that the semantic content (as opposed to the pragmatically conveyed content) of a sentence containing the expression varies from context to context. But it is by no means con- troversial to say that many philosophers and linguists treat context-sensitivity in this way. It is this sort of semantic treatment of context-sensitivity that I’m interested in. The semantic treatment of context-sensitivity leaves us with a metasemantic ∗ Thanks to Christopher Gauker, Jeff King, and several anonymous referees for helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. Thanks also to audiences at the CUNY Cognitive Science Speaker Series, the Context-Relativity in Semantics conference at the University of Salzburg, The Ninth International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context in Larnaca, Cyprus, Jeff King’s graduate seminar at Rutgers University, and Meaning & Other Things: A conference celebrating the work of Stephen Schiffer at NYU for helpful discussion of earlier versions of this paper. 1 This is the penultimate draft. For citation purposes please see the published version in Erkenntnis.