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It has been claimed that pragmatic effects that arise in embedded clauses pose a problem for the Gricean reasoning procedure. I maintain, however, that the real issue these phenomena raise for Grice, as he himself acknowledged, is their violation of his saying/implicating distinction. While these effects can be accounted for by Gricean reasoning, which Mandy Simons clearly demonstrates, there is no way round this latter problem other than a major revision of Grice’s notion of ‘saying’ and hence of the saying/implicating (...) |
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I defend the claim that it is possible for thoughts to be context-sensitive. Assuming that a thought is a sentence of Mentalese and content is a function from indices to truth-values, then a thought, T, is context-sensitive IFF at least one of the following three conditions are met: T exhibits character-underdeterminacy, where T is character underdetermined iff a component of T makes an explicit reference to the context to establish content. T exhibits type-underdeterminacy, where T is type underdetermined iff there (...) |
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Interpretations of logics with only truth-functional connectives create a number of problems regarding the understanding of interpreted sentences. A particular problem is caused by the understanding of a sentence that is the negation of another. What is the meaning of sentence ¬p, for a particular sentence p? Even when we know what the semantic correlate of the sentence p is, we still do not know how to understand the semantic correlate of the sentence ¬p. The standard algebraic approach does not (...) |
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The semantics/pragmatics distinction was once considered central to the philosophy of language, but recently the distinction’s viability and importance have been challenged. In opposition to the growing movement away from the distinction, I argue that we really do need it, and that we can draw the distinction sharply if we draw it in terms of the distinction between non-mental and mental phenomena. On my view, semantic facts arise from context-independent meaning, compositional rules, and non-mental elements of context, whereas pragmatic facts (...) |
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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. |
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In this paper, I will investigate Wittgenstein’s idea about the context-sensitivity of utterance. It is the idea that there is a big gap between understanding a sentence in the sense of knowing the idioms and discerning the grammar in it, and what is said by using it in a particular context. Although context-sensitivity in this moderate sense is a familiar idea in Wittgensteinian scholarship, it has mainly been studied as an idea in “Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language.” However, Wittgenstein’s interest in (...) |
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This piece undertakes to sketch the contemporary approaches toward meaning known as pragmatics and semantics. Today, this pairing is associated with a controversy or question that concerns the proposition. Yet, while the pragmatics/semantics debate attests to the proposition's precise status being in doubt, the underlying belief remains that the work of the proposition or something like it – e.g., utterances, a portion of which function propositionally – eventually can be established. Jacques Derrida in his writings on Husserl questions even this (...) |
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This article aims to contribute to ongoing debate on the place of metaphor at the semantics/pragmatics interface. Contextualists have argued that metaphorical utterances (i.e., prosaic/conventional metaphors) behave like literally loose uses of speech in that they are interpreted automatically and unreflectively. If metaphors are interpreted along the same lines as literally loose speech, metaphorical content is part of what a speaker says, and is classified as semantic. Some other authors have observed that metaphorical utterances (i.e., poetic, novel metaphors) seem to (...) |
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These lines — also attributed to H. L. Mencken and Carl Jung — although perhaps politically incorrect, are surely correct in reminding us that more is involved in what one communicates than what one literally says; more is involved in what one means than the standard, conventional meaning of the words one uses. The words ‘yes,’ ‘perhaps,’ and ‘no’ each has a perfectly identifiable meaning, known by every speaker of English (including not very competent ones). However, as those lines illustrate, (...) |
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semantic minimalism and moderte contextualism. |
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Explicatures are not cancellable. Theoretical considerations. |
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In this paper I offer a defence of a Russellian analysis of the referential uses of incomplete (mis)descriptions, in a contextual setting. With regard to the debate between a unificationist and an ambiguity approach to the formal treatment of definite descriptions (introduction), I will support the former against the latter. In 1. I explain what I mean by "essentially" incomplete descriptions: incomplete descriptions are context dependent descriptions. In 2. I examine one of the best versions of the unificationist “explicit” approach (...) |
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All sorts of things are context-dependent in one way or another. What it is appropriate to wear, to give, or to reveal depends on the context. Whether or not it is all right to lie, harm, or even kill depends on the context. If you google the phrase ‘depends on the context’, you’ll get several hundred million results. This chapter aims to narrow that down. In this context the topic is context dependence in language and its use. It is commonly (...) |
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One of the most important and, at the same time, most controversial issues in metasemantics is the question of what semantics is, and what distinguishes semantic elements (features, properties, phenomena, mechanisms, processes, or whatever) from the rest. The issue is tightly linked with the debate over the semantics-pragmatics distinction, which has been vibrant for a decade or two, but seems to be reaching an impasse. I suggest that this impasse may be due to the failure to recognize a distinct realm (...) |
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