Minimalism and Speakers’ Intuitions

Minimalism proposes a semantics that does not account for speakers’ intuitions about the truth conditions of a range of sentences or utterances. Thus, a challenge for this view is to offer an explanation of how its assignment of semantic contents to these sentences is grounded in their use. Such an account was mainly offered by Soames, but also suggested by Cappelen and Lepore. The article criticizes this explanation by presenting four kinds of counterexamples to it, and arrives at the conclusion that minimalism has not successfully answered the above-mentioned challenge