Este trabalho pretende sustentar que o melhor conceito para tratar da relação entre metáfora e linguagem é o da subdeterminação semântica. Entretanto, o modo mais comum de tratar o fenômeno das metáforas relega à pragmática a função de explicar como o significado metafórico de uma frase é um acarretamento gerado pelo contexto. Segundo este quadro, metáforas seriam indeterminadas semanticamente pois acarretamentos pragmáticos são virtualmente infinitos e não precisam remeter à proposição semanticamente expressa. Argumentamos, entretanto, as melhores alternativas para o tratamento (...) da questão nascem do debate entre contextualismo e minimalismo semânticos. Metáforas seriam casos de flexibilidade semântica também presentes em outros fenômenos linguísticos. Para o minimalismo, metáforas podem ser tratadas através da introdução de um operador lexical que garantiria a flexibilidade contextual necessária a termos semânticos contextualmente dependentes. Para o contextualismo, metáforas acontecem quando termos em uma frase funcionam como conceitos ad hoc e são passíveis de enriquecimentos pragmáticos. Apesar de não chegarem a uma única solução, o debate entre minimalismo e contextualismo oferece explicações do fenômeno que corroboram a hipótese da subdeterminação semântica defendida neste trabalho. (shrink)

Compound figures are a rich, and under-explored area for tackling fundamental issues in philosophy of language. This paper explores new ideas about how to explain some features of such figures. We start with an observation from Stern that in ironic-metaphor, metaphor is logically prior to irony in the structure of what is communicated. Call this thesis Logical-MPT. We argue that a speech-act-based explanation of Logical-MPT is to be preferred to a content-based explanation. To create this explanation we draw on Barker’s (...) expressivist speech-act theory, in which speech-acts build on other speech-acts to achieve the desired communicative effects. In particular, we show how Barker’s general ideas explain metaphor as an assertive-act, and irony as a ridiculing-act. We use Barker’s notion of proto-illocutionary-acts to show how metaphorical-acts and ironic-acts can build one on the other. Finally, we show that while an ironic-act can build on a metaphorical-act, a metaphorical-act cannot build on an ironic-act. This restriction on how they can be composed establishes Logical-MPT via a different route. (shrink)

This paper considers ways that experimental design can affect judgments about informally presented context shifting experiments. Reasons are given to think that judgments about informal context shifting experiments are affected by an exclusive reliance on binary truth value judgments and by experimenter bias. Exclusive reliance on binary truth value judgments may produce experimental artifacts by obscuring important differences of degree between the phenomena being investigated. Experimenter bias is an effect generated when, for example, experimenters disclose (even unconsciously) their own beliefs (...) about the outcome of an experiment. Eliminating experimenter bias from context shifting experiments makes it far less obvious what the “intuitive” responses to those experiments are. After it is shown how those different kinds of bias can affect judgments about informal context shifting experiments, those experiments are revised to control for those forms of bias. The upshot of these investigations is that participants in the contextualist debate who employ informal experiments should pay just as much attention to the design of their experiments as those who employ more formal experimental techniques if they want to avoid obscuring the phenomena they aim to uncover. (shrink)