ABSTRACT
Contexts vary in indefinitely many ways—in terms of who is speaking, who the audience is, what is common ground between speaker and audience, what the local weather is, whether the participants like one another, etc. Some phrases have meanings whose semantic values vary systematically with some aspect of context; a phrase like this it is said to be context sensitive. While Frege did not think that ‘believes’ was sensitive to non-linguistic context, he did think that that verb created a linguistic context which affected the semantic values of expressions occurring in it. According to Richard, attitude ascription involves using the complement of an ascription to represent or ‘translate’ some representation of the ascription’s subject. Mental representations being peculiar to their possessor, the representation referred to will be different from that referred to in a use of a conclusion. Young children recognize that there are different ways to get information, even when their language lacks evidential markers.
