This is Philosophy Bites with me Nigel Warburton and me David Edmonds.

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Imagine that I'd said to Nigel after an interview.

That was the best philosophy bites interview we've ever conducted.

Perhaps I was being ironic or sarcastic, but perhaps I meant it literally.

If you had more information, you might be able to work out my meaning, say if you'd heard my tone of voice, or if you'd been sitting in on the interview too.

So what is the relationship between meaning and context? We spoke to Emma Borg. To put her into context, she's an

expert on the philosophy of language. Emma Borg, welcome to Philosophy Bites.

Thank you very much, delighted to be here. The topic we're going to focus on is

language and context. Now what's context got to do with language? Okay I mean that's a good

question. So let's think about maybe a question that comes slightly before that. Let's think about what it would be to understand a language.

And we might think how is it when you learn a language like French or German or whatever, how is it that you understand the sentences or the expressions that you're being presented with?

And one possibility, I guess, would be that what you've learned when you're learning a language is something that

pairs up the sentences of that language with the meaning in that language. So when

someone presents you with a bit of this new language what you do is you go to your

big lookup list and you find the

sentence in question and you pair it with the meaning and that's it you've got the

meaning. That might be one way in which language learning could go, but it seems that after a moment's reflection that can't be quite right.

And it can't be quite right because language looks like it's got this quite surprising feature that we can just generate lots and lots, maybe even

...