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Abstract I think it is fair to say that not so long ago in philosophy of language formal semantic theories occupied the central ground: not everyone pursued a formal approach to theories of meaning, but lots of people did.¹ These days, the natural descendant of the formal approach, known as minimalism, has been consigned to the margins: not everyone rejects minimalism, but lots of people do. Minimalism is rejected in favour of contextualism: roughly, the idea that pragmatic effects are endemic throughout truth-evaluable semantic content. In Insensitive Semantics (henceforth IS) Herman Cappelen and Ernie Lepore (henceforth CL) try to redress this balance by presenting a robust defence of minimalism. I agree with lots of what they write: I too would like to defend minimalism against the contextualist hoard and I think, as do CL, that the way to do it is to reject things like the contextualist’s context-shifting arguments. Furthermore, I think the reasons for rejection are, broadly speaking, the reasons CL give. So, it might seem that there is little for me to say in this chapter. Unfortunately, however, even though advocates of minimalism are thin on the ground and even though I believe we ought to present a united front to the opposition, I do have some concerns about the way in which CL frame the debate.² So, in this chapter I’m going to suggest that CL fail to locate the core of the debate between the two semantic programmes and that, as a result, the kind of minimalism they end up advocating concedes too much to the contextualist camp. However, despite the negative aims of this chapter, it should be remembered that, overall, I believe CL are on the right side in semantics.