ABSTRACT
This chapter describes that readers already have a reasonable understanding of what Contextualism in Epistemology says, and what work it does in the theory of knowledge. Contextualism encompasses a descriptive empirical claim about linguistic meaning in context: they are not making a point (directly) about knowledge, but about the word 'know'. The chapter introduces Relevance Theory, a cognitive-representational, modular, and intention-oriented approach to linguistic communication. It explains its notion of explicature, urging that it is an empirically supported level of meaning in between what is said by a sentence at a context and what a speaker merely conveys in addition. Drawing on Noam Chomsky and Jerry Fodor, Relevance Theory takes its task to be the empirical description of the actual linguistic and psychological mechanisms at work in human communication; and the description it favours posits unconscious mental operations over representations, some of these performed in a modular way by a special-purpose language faculty.
