In the past several decades, psychologists and linguists have begun experimentally investigating linguistic pragmatic phenomena. They share the assumption that the best way to study the use of language in context incorporates an experimental methodology, here understood to comprise controlled studies and careful field observations. This article surveys some key projects in experimental pragmatics and relates these projects to ongoing philosophical discussions.

There is a wealth of experimental data showing that the way a problem is framed may have an effect on people's choices and decisions. Based on a semantic analysis of evaluative expressions like ‘good’, I propose a new explanation of such framing effects. The key idea is that our choices and decisions reveal a counterfactual systematicity: they carry information about the choices and decisions we would have made if the facts had been otherwise. It is these counterfactual alternatives that may (...) diverge between otherwise equivalent versions of the same task, and thus explain the effects of framing. (shrink)

Natural language contains many expressions with underspecified emotive content. This paper proposes a way to resolve such underspecification. Nonmonotonic inference over a knowledge base is used to derive an expected interpretation for emotive expressions in a particular context. This ‘normal’ meaning is then taken to influence the hearer’s expectations about probable interpretations, and, because of these probable interpretations, the decisions of the speaker about when use of underspecified emotive terms is appropriate.

Natural language contains many expressions with underspecified emotive content. This paper proposes a way to resolve such underspecification. Nonmonotonic inference over a knowledge base is used to derive an expected interpretation for emotive expressions in a particular context. This ‘normal’ meaning is then taken to influence the hearer’s expectations about probable interpretations, and, because of these probable interpretations, the decisions of the speaker about when use of underspecified emotive terms is appropriate.

This paper offers a unified semantic explanation of two observations that prove to be problematic for classical analyses of modals, conditionals, and disjunctions: the fact that disjunctions scoping under possibility modals give rise to the free choice effect and the fact that counterfactuals license simplification of disjunctive antecedents. It shows that the data are well explained by a dynamic semantic analysis of modals and conditionals that uses ideas from the inquisitive semantic tradition in its treatment of disjunction. The analysis explains (...) why embedding a disjunctive possibility under negation reverts disjunction to its classical behavior, is general enough to predict less studied simplification patterns, and also makes progress toward a unified perspective on the distinction between informative, inquisitive, and attentive content. (shrink)

Explicatures are not cancellable. Theoretical considerations.

There are two central themes that occupy the commentaries, and hence this response. The first is the character and role of what is said, both in my account, and in pragmatic theory in general. In response, I lay out in more detail the proposal from my original paper that the starting point for Gricean reasoning should be not what is said, but the pragmatically uncommitted what is expressed. As part of this argument, I restate and provide further arguments for my (...) claim that global and local pragmatic effects are continuous. The second central theme of the commentaries concerns the value of a Gricean account, which is not intended to model the psychological processes of interpretation. I respond to this concern in Section 5, ‘Pragmatics, psychology and processing’. (shrink)

I argue for a version of logical pluralism based on the plurality of legitimate formalizations of the logical vocabulary. In particular, I argue that the apparent rivalry between classical and relevant logic can be resolved, given that both logics capture and formalize normative and legitimate senses of logical consequence: classical logic encodes “follows from” as truth preservation and captures the truth conditions of the logical constants, while relevant logic encodes a notion of “follows from” which, apart from preserving truth, avoids (...) the violation of certain Gricean maxims and captures a different inferential role for the same logical constants, enriching their meaning pragmatically. (shrink)

ABSTRACT My aim in this paper is to present a pluralist thesis about the inferential role of logical constants, which embraces classical, relevant, linear and ordered logic. That is, I defend that a logical constant c has more than one correct inferential role. The thesis depends on a particular interpretation of substructural logics' vocabulary, according to which classical logic captures the literal meaning of logical constants and substructural logics encode a pragmatically enriched sense of those connectives. The paper is divided (...) into four parts: first, I introduce the motivation for the pluralist thesis of the paper; second I introduce the calculus for the different logics endorsed in the pluralist thesis; third, I motivate how the different behaviors of the logical vocabulary of these logics can be pragmatically interpreted, and fourth, I motivate how the different inferential roles that each substructural logic attribute to logical constants can coexist, and how we should reason with a logical constant c given this plurality. (shrink)

Gricean pragmatics has often been criticised for being implausible from a psychological point of view. This line of criticism is never backed up by empirical evidence, but more importantly, it ignores the fact that Grice never meant to advance a processing theory, in the first place. Taking our lead from Marr, we distinguish between two levels of explanation: at the W-level, we are concerned with what agents do and why; at the H-level, we ask how agents do whatever it is (...) they do. Whereas pragmatics is pitched at the W-level, processing theories are at the H-level. This is not to say that pragmatics has no implications for psychology at all, but it is to say that its implications are less direct than is often supposed. (shrink)