<Forthcoming in Philosophical Studies. Draft of 4 Sep 2020. Please cite the published version.> Reply to Pietroski Juhani Yli-Vakkuri Australian Catholic University John Hawthorne Australian Catholic University & University of Southern California The phenomenon of polysemy is a central theme in Paul Pietroski’s (2020) discussion of our book Narrow Content (NC). Polysemy is the kind of context-sensitivity displayed by most natural language words, as illustrated in a number of examples by Chomsky, echoed by Pietroski. ‘That is water’ might express one proposition—a true one—in a context where the speaker is referring to a 150 ml sample drawn from the St. Lawerence River in Montreal, while expressing a different proposition—a false one—in a context where the speaker is referring to a 150 ml cup of tea, even though the second sample has a much higher H2O content than the first. Each proposition has an equally legitimate claim to being the semantic content of the sentence in the context. These are not examples of ‘conversational implicatures’, ‘conventional implicatures’, ‘speaker’s meanings’, or other phenomena whose study belongs to pragmatics rather than semantics. Nor are they examples of ‘indexicality’, in that they do not at all resemble paradigms like ‘I’ and ‘actually’ whose context-independent meanings we can fruitfully represent, following Kaplan (1977/1989), as ‘characters’ or functions from contexts to contents. This is what we take Pietroski to mean when he speaks of context-sensitivity that ‘can’t plausibly accommodated in Kaplanian ways’ (**), and we agree with him. (On Pietroski’s favored way of understanding polysemy, polysemous words express different concepts on different occasions of use. We tried to steer clear of the ideology of concepts, since it seemed to us a bit fraught. But we have no objection to Pietroski’s using the term ‘concept’ in the way that he does.) Since context-sensitivity was not relevant to our discussion, we simply ignored it. Pretty much all of the words we used or mentioned in the book were context-sensitive in some way, and we didn’t see any point to telling the reader this. But let’s be clear: We don’t think a typical ‘that’-clause like ‘that this is a cup of tea’ aptly describes any intentional state apart from a context in which a speaker uses ‘this’ to refer to some object and ‘is a cup of tea’ to express some content (a property, as we think of it), and we agree that this context-sensitivity ‘can’t be plausibly accommodated in Kaplanian ways’ (**). To our surprise, Pietroski thinks we shouldn’t agree with him here. He says that: [we] can grant that ur-content ascription is context sensitive in ways that can’t be plausibly accommodated in Kaplanian ways. But then [we] can’t assume a tight connection between thoughts and the sentences we use in contexts to ascribe thoughts—at least not in a conversation with an unconcessive internalist who left the table, suspecting a rigged game, upon seeing the ‘the’ in thesis (T). (T) The thought we express with [‘Jill has some water’] is true if and only if Jill has some H2O (**). It is as well to clarify to the reader of some of our metasemantic views.