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Is Semantics Still Possible?
Abstract
The standard view of semantics—that every disambiguated sentence has a determinate semantic content, relative to an assignment of contents to its indexical expressions, and not necessarily identical to what may be conveyed (pragmatically) by its utterance—is defended against standard objections and is also argued for on independent grounds, which suggest that resistance to the view comes from a failure to distinguish between “strict semantics” and “loose semantics”.
... here?' 'who told those workers to work here!' The demonstrative haay is used to point at a singular feminine entity in utterance (3), at a plural feminine entity in (4) and at a plural masculine entity in (6) and (8). The plural feminine/masculine haDawl is used to point at a plural feminine in (3) and at a plural masculine entity in (7). ...
... These constraints pertain to number and gender of the common noun. The elements within this set are only three: a. a singular feminine entity as in utterance (3), b. a plural feminine entity as in (4), or c. a plural masculine entity as in utterances (2), (6), and (8). Using haay to encode a singular, masculine entity is semantically anomalous in JA. ...
... Investigation of the interface between semantics and pragmatics essentially relates to arriving at comprehensive and practical definitions of each of these fields of linguistics (see Ariel, 2002;Bach, 1997;Recanati, 2002Recanati, , 2004Giora, 1997Giora, , 2002Levinson, 1995). The search for such definitions has principally focused on the following core aspects: (1) literal and non-literal meaning (see Ariel, 2002;Katz, 1977;Berg, 2002), (2) the minimalist views of semantics and pragmatics (see Carston, 2008;Cappelen and Lepore, 2005; Bach, 1997), (3) arguments focusing on 'what is said' and 'what is implicated' (see Recanati, 1989Recanati, , 1993Recanati, , 1995Dascal, 1987;Gibbs, 1984Gibbs, , 1994Sperber and Wilson, 1986;Clark, 1996), and (4) discussions of context-sensitivity such as those relating to 'narrow' and 'broad' contexts (see Bach, 1997;Carston, 2008). ...
The aim in this study is to investigate the interface between semantics and pragmatics in relation to the use of the indexical demonstrative ‘haay’ ‘this-S.F.’ in Jordanian Arabic (JA). It is argued here that an analysis of meaning in relation to context-sensitivity inherent in the use of ‘haay’ can give evidence to the view that semantic and pragmatic processes can be distinguished from each other. I have found that the meaning of ‘haay’ consists of three distinct levels: linguistic, semantic, and pragmatic meaning. The denotational and conventional senses of ‘haay’ comprise its linguistic meaning, its semantic meaning is generated when any of the variables in the linguistic meaning is selected in relation to 'narrow context', the pragmatic meaning depends on relating the semantic meaning to an entity in the physical context of interaction. The results of this study support the view that the boundary between semantics and pragmatics can be distinctively demarcated. 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Journal of Pragmatics, 34(4), 403–421.
... I thank Ginat Ariel for bringing to my attention the Barak source. context'' either, so they had to divorce their semantic/literal meaning from a full truth-conditional representation (1) (see Berg, 2002). The more important goal was seen as avoiding the assumption of a massive context dependence. ...
... Each of these is well defined (even if researchers sometimes disagree about whether specific meanings should count as linguistic, as particularized or as generalized conversational implicatures). I have argued that the classical literal meaning and 'what is said'/ explicature are (also) an attempt to represent the content of a basic-level meaning (since linguistic meaning was seen as too incomplete and implicatures as too rich, see Berg, 2002). In an attempt to find an interactionally based minimal meaning of this kind, I examined real discourses in order to find out what types of meanings are interactionally privileged for interlocutors. ...
I have elsewhere argued (Ariel, 2002) against the assumption that we can identify one literal meaning per sentence. Instead, I have suggested that there are (at least) three types of minimal meanings, each differently motivated. One implicit motivation behind the classical definition of literal meaning (Grice's ‘what is said’) is a wish to capture the core content of sentences. I here examine discourse in order to characterize this type of minimal meaning, which I term ‘privileged interactional interpretation’. Privileged interactional interpretations constitute what the speaker is taken to be truthfully or sincerely committed to. Crucially, they also constitute the speaker's relevant contribution to the discourse. I argue that Sperber and Wilson's (1986b/1995) explicatures (linguistic meanings enriched up to full propositionality) are commonly perceived as privileged interactional interpretations, but not invariably so. Interlocutors pick both less enriched meanings (enriched but incomplete propositions, irrelevant unenriched linguistic meanings) and more enriched meanings (particularized and generalized conversational implicatures) as their privileged interactional interpretations. Thus, no single formula of meaning representation (be it linguistic meaning, ‘what is said’, explicature, implicature, conveyed meaning) can define a privileged interactional interpretation appropriate for all occasions.
... Semantics has multiple definitions in different fields, such as linguistics [44], [45], cognitive science [46], [47], artificial intelligence [48], [49] and etc. In cognitive science, semantic memory is about facts that capture the internal properties about an object [27], [47]. ...
Integration between biology and information science benefits both fields. Many related models have been proposed, such as computational visual cognition models, computational motor control models, integrations of both and so on. In general, the robustness and precision of recognition is one of the key problems for object recognition models. In this paper, inspired by features of human recognition process and their biological mechanisms, a new integrated and dynamic framework is proposed to mimic the semantic extraction, concept formation and feature re-selection in human visual processing. The main contributions of the proposed model are as follows: (1) Semantic feature extraction: Local semantic features are learnt from episodic features that are extracted from raw images through a deep neural network; (2) Integrated concept formation: Concepts are formed with local semantic information and structural information learnt through network. (3) Feature re-selection: When ambiguity is detected during recognition process, distinctive features according to the difference between ambiguous candidates are re-selected for recognition. Experimental results on hand-written digits and facial shape dataset show that, compared with other methods, the new proposed model exhibits higher robustness and precision for visual recognition, especially in the condition when input samples are smantic ambiguous. Meanwhile, the introduced biological mechanisms further strengthen the interaction between neuroscience and information science.
... I then endorsed Millianism for the meaning of proper names. The issues with which I began this paper and that would require to take a stance and side with ARM or RM do not arise in my view 30 See Berg (2002); Borg (2004); Cappelen and Lepore (2005); Recanati (2004); Stanley and Szabó (2000) for a few sample of alternative views. because of the distinction I make. ...
What is the content of beliefs expressed by sentences with fictional names? Millianism has notoriously struggled to give a satisfactory answer to this question. Some Millians have argued that fictional names are empty names. But such a view entails that the belief that Superman has impressive superpowers and the belief that Aquaman has impressive superpowers have the same content, contrary to our intuitions. Others have argued that fictional names refer to fictional entities. But this view has a long-standing problem, Frege’s Puzzle, and many philosophers are skeptical that Millians have successfully addressed it, despite commendable efforts. In this paper, I put forward a different Millian Theory of fictional proper names that by-passes these and other objections related to belief content. The novelty of my proposal partially rests on a distinction I draw between semantic content and belief content—as opposed to a distinction between belief content and belief state or a way of grasping the content, as it is commonly found in Millian accounts—in a framework where belief contents are not part of the meaning of names.
... She would also have to argue that the intuitions about utterances of (1) hold water. One can deny the data and claim that both utterances of (1) are true: one can either claim that (1) is an example of unspecific meaning and that both utterances are true but the second one is misleading (Sainsbury 2002, Berg 2002 or claim that (1) has a constant content across all contexts of utterances, and that the intuitions about the two utterances are the result of what is communicated by them (Cappelen and Lepore 2005). Some defenders of underdetermination (e.g. ...
... For this reason, these implcatures were also not considered as contributing to or influencing the truth-conditional meaning of the proposition expressed. This notion of the basic-level meaning was further developed by the Minimalist approach (Bach 1994;Berg 2002;Borg 2004), which allowed for a limited number of pragmatic inferences to be included in "what is said," as long as they are grammatically mandated (same as Grice) and not dependent on speaker's intention (stricter than Grice) (Ariel 2008: 268). We will refer to this level as "what is saidmin." ...
Deception in Indian electronic media, especially television, has reached its zenith for several reasons in recent times. Due to increased competition among thousands and odd television channels, the media tended to adopt deception and connivance as strategies of survival. While deception subsumes a wide range of communication strategies, connivance is tinged with politics of various hues such as national politics, regionalism, casteism, and market driven economic considerations. The deception often transforms into a form that exhibits a tendency to create crisis by arousing passions of different sections of society towards a topical subject; later it attempts to diffuse the same crisis in connivance with political establishment. The present chapter not only highlights a few such important deceptive stories of television in Indian media in the recent past but also analyses the manner the Telugu media had created severe crisis with regard to demonetization in the twin Telugu states through creation of fake news.
... Tipped off by Minimalists' ideas, one might predict that the explicatures which result from the processes involved in Grice's (1989) 'Explicated min ', i.e., Lexical ambiguity resolution and Reference resolution (core inferences), will be relatively harder to deny. Such a result will lend support to the psychological reality of the Gricean 'Explicated min ', since it will place these two inference types closer to the linguistic meaning than other explicated inferences on the continuum (Berg 2002;Borg 2005;Grice 1989;Horn 1984Horn , 2006Levinson 1983Levinson , 2000. In an intermediate position we may find Levinson's additional 'presumptive meanings'. ...
... Semantics has multiple definitions in different fields, such as linguistics [44], [45], cognitive science [46], [47], artificial intelligence [48], [49] and etc. In cognitive science, semantic memory is about facts that capture the internal properties about an object [27], [47]. ...
Integration between biology and information science benefits both fields. Many related models have been proposed, such as computational visual cognition models, computational motor control models, integrations of both and so on. In general, the robustness and precision of recognition is one of the key problems for object recognition models. In this paper, inspired by features of human recognition process and their biological mechanisms, a new integrated and dynamic framework is proposed to mimic the semantic extraction, concept formation and feature re-selection in human visual processing. The main contributions of the proposed model are as follows: (1) Semantic feature extraction: Local semantic features are learnt from episodic features that are extracted from raw images through a deep neural network; (2) Integrated concept formation: Concepts are formed with local semantic information and structural information learnt through network. (3) Feature re-selection: When ambiguity is detected during recognition process, distinctive features according to the difference between ambiguous candidates are re-selected for recognition. Experimental results on hand-written digits and facial shape dataset show that, compared with other methods, the new proposed model exhibits higher robustness and precision for visual recognition, especially in the condition when input samples are smantic ambiguous. Meanwhile, the introduced biological mechanisms further strengthen the interaction between neuroscience and information science.
... Within theoretical linguistics, there has been a long-standing controversy about the proper characterization of the relation between semantics and pragmatics. These border wars have centered on the questions of where semantics ends and pragmatics begins and how pragmatic inferences are calculated (Berg, 2002;Bezuidenhout & Cutting, 2002;Gibbs & Moise, 1997;Nicolle & Clark, 1999). Three types of theories are of particular interest for the psycholinguistic study of scalar implicature. ...
The relationship between semantic and pragmatic interpretation has been a perennial puzzle in psycholinguistics. General agreement about the existence of these levels of interpretation contrasts with controversy in the field over exact boundaries between these representations and their relationship in real-time processing. Past research has demonstrated that pragmatic processing is rapid, often beginning before phrasal completion (Frisson & Pickering, 1999; Sedivy et al., 1999). However, they leave open the question of whether the pragmatic interpretation is preceded by some degree of semantic interpretation, as most linguistic theories would predict. These current experiments address this question by examining a relatively well-understood test case from linguistics. Horn (1989) noted that scalar quantifiers like some have two distinct readings corresponding to lexical semantics (SOME AND POSSIBLY ALL) and pragmatic inference (SOME BUT NOT ALL). A visual world task was used to track the online interpretation of some, all, two and three in adults and five-year-olds. The context provided two potential referents for the quantified noun phrase (e.g., a girl with 2 of 4 socks and one with 3 of 3 soccer balls). For all, two and three the reference of the quantified noun phrase was disambiguated by the semantics of the quantifier and participants were able to converge on the target shortly after quantifier onset. For some, however, determining the referent required a pragmatic implicature. On these trials looks to the target were substantially delayed, demonstrating a lag between semantic processing and the calculation of the implicature. Nevertheless, adults showed a preference for the target prior to phrasal completion, demonstrating that scalar inferences can occur as an utterance unfolds. Children, however, failed to calculate the implicature, converging on the target only after instructions were completed.
... (8d), a very weak general proposition is what is said: for (8c), that there is some presence of milk in the fridge (perhaps just a stale drip or two on a shelf); for (8d), that the speaker's life is not entirely breakfastless. Of course, something much more specific is understood in context (for instance, that there is milk usable for coffee in the fridge; that the speaker has had breakfast on the day of utterance) and, arguably, it is only these latter that are speaker-meant and so, on this kind of account, these are implicatures (for advocates of this approach, see Kripke 1977, Berg 2002). ...
Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of London, 1998.
... Within theoretical linguistics, there has been a long-standing controversy about the proper characterization of the relation between semantics and pragmatics. These border wars have centered on the questions of where semantics ends and pragmatics begins and how pragmatic inferences are calculated (Berg, 2002; Bezuidenhout & Cutting, 2002; Gibbs & Moise, 1997; Nicolle & Clark, 1999). Three types of theories are of particular interest for the psycholinguistic study of scalar implicature. ...
Scalar implicature has served as a test case for exploring the relations between semantic and pragmatic processes during language comprehension. Most studies have used reaction time methods and the results have been variable. In these studies, we use the visual-world paradigm to investigate implicature. We recorded participants' eye movements during commands like "Point to the girl that has some of the socks" in the presence of a display in which one girl had two of four socks and another had three of three soccer balls. These utterances contained an initial period of ambiguity in which the semantics of some was compatible with both characters. This ambiguity could be immediately resolved by a pragmatic implicature which would restrict some to a proper subset. Instead in Experiments 1 and 2, we found that participants were substantially delayed, suggesting a lag between semantic and pragmatic processing. In Experiment 3, we examined interpretations of some when competitors were inconsistent with the semantics (girl with socks vs. girl with no socks). We found quick resolution of the target, suggesting that previous delays were specifically linked to pragmatic analysis.
This paper presents experimental evidence in support of the existence of metalinguistic moral encroachment: the influence of the moral consequences of using a word with a given content upon the content of that word. The evidence collected implies that the effect of moral factors upon content is weak. The implications of this for Esa Díaz-León’s recent attempt to show how Jennifer Saul can legitimately reject an empirical semantic hypothesis on political grounds are described. Directions for future research are also described.
Suppose Jill utters the sentence (i)Everybody is wearing a hat, thereby meaning only that everybody she sees is wearing a hat. Did she thus say that everybody she sees is wearing a hat? That is, would the indirect discourse report (ii)Jill said that everybody she sees is wearing a hat be true? Given that Jill obviously meant to be talking only about everybody she sees, and not everybody in the whole universe, conventional wisdom has it that those who would take (ii) as true clearly have intuition on their side; whereas the view that (ii) would be false, and that (iii)Jill said that everybody in the whole universe is wearing a hat would be true, is no less conventionally viewed as highly counterintuitive. I will argue that the conventional wisdom is wrong—upon closer and more careful examination, our intuitions actually favor (iii) over (ii). To show this I will question not only the intuitive plausibility of particular indirect discourse reports, but also the intuitive plausibility of certain consequences of taking reports such as (ii) as true. © Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature 2019.
This essay discusses the relationships between contextualism and the traditional semantic approach to natural languages. It concludes that the classic contextualist examples are naturally accountable from the traditionalist viewpoint, and that the forms of contextual dependence stressed by the contextualists are semantically unsurprising. The final section explains how the analysis defended here does not involve implicit concessions to the contextualist cause, and does not demand any radical revision of the classic semantic take on natural language.
This book discusses the views of meaning and truth implicit in the traditionalapproach to natural-language semantics. Its main thesis is that the philosophical presuppositions entailed by that approach have often been misunderstood even by its foremost defenders, and that such a misunderstanding has fuelled an unjustified but increasingly popular sceptical attitude. This conclusion is defended by focusing on the distinction between the essential philosophical traits of traditional natural-language semantics, and certain accidental features allegedly characteristic of some of its typical applications to the study of particular utterances. As a result, the book puts forth claims about the logical profile of indexical expressions, about the semantic behaviour of attitude reports, and about phenomena such as discourse about fiction, approximation, and contextual dependence. In its central chapters, it challenges the adequacy of a token-reflexive approach to indexicality, and questions the urgency of the so-called contextualist view of communication.
The aim of this paper is to contribute to the debate between contextualism and minimalism. I show that one of the main arguments against minimalism, which I called "argument of loss of generality of the notion of implicature", is based on a misunderstanding or a simplification of the mechanism of generation of conversational implicatures.
When using language, many aspects of our messages are left implicit in what we say. While grammar is responsible for what we express explicitly, pragmatics explains how we infer additional meanings. The problem is that it is not always a trivial matter to decide which of the meanings conveyed is explicit (grammatical) and which implicit (pragmatic). Pragmatics and Grammar lays out a methodology for students and scholars to distinguish between the two. It explains how and why grammar and pragmatics combine together in natural discourse, and how pragmatic uses become grammatical in time.
Catharine MacKinnon claimed that pornography silence's women's speech where this speech is protected by free speech legislation. MacKinnon's claim was attacked as confused because, so it seemed, pornography is not the kind of thing that can silence speech. Using ideas drawn from John Austin's account of speech acts, Rae Langton defended MacKinnon's claim against this attack by showing how speech can, in principle, be silenced by pornography. However, Langton's defence requires us to deviate from a widely held understanding of what kind of speech is protected; namely the expression of opinions, ideas, and thoughts. In this paper I provide an alternative defence of MacKinnon's claim which requires no such deviation. I argue that because the truth-conditions of sentences are context-sensitive it is possible for there to be contexts in which, when those in attendance believe rape myths, it is not possible to express certain opinions, ideas, or thoughts. Given that pornography is a significant contributor to rape myth acceptance, this argument addresses the accusation of confusion facing MacKinnon without the need for deviation. The cross-examination of a complainant in a rape trial is used as an illustration.
This paper analyzes a longstanding legal controversy over two competing interpretations of Hispanic-American constitutional statements on citizenship: one marked (which excluded women under the assumption that they were by nature unfit for citizenship) and another unmarked (which included women as well as men). The unmarked or inclusive reading stemmed from the use of a generic gender form in the legal text, which had been intended by the framers to exclude women. The unmarked meaning acquired a sudden prominence in the last quarter of the nineteenth century when some judges allowed women to register as voters, arguing that their decision was in conformity with the letter of the law. That claim marked the start of a negotiation process over the inclusion of women in the constitutional notion of citizenship in at least ten Hispanic American countries that lasted for nearly a century. My analysis of that process proposes three basic conclusions that challenge dominant premises in both the legal and linguistic literature. First, literality is not indeterminate, nor is it subordinate to the speaker's intentions, as often claimed, but rather fixed and autonomous. Second, literalists are not, by definition, defenders of the status quo, as often argued. The literalists under evaluation challenged the stability of the legal order with their claim of literal inclusiveness. Third, literalist and teleological or political approaches to legal interpretation are not antagonistic but rather complementary.
Ever since Horn 1972, it has been a received view that the lexical meaning of scalar quantifiers specifies only a lower bound. Most, it is assumed, codes 'more than half', also covering 'all'. To account for most's common interpretation, 'more than half but less than all', linguists have assumed a 'not all' implicature. I argue that the implicature analysis cannot account for most of the discourse data, and that the upper bound on most is independent of a 'not all' implicature. Furthermore, based on questionnaire results, I propose a different semantics-pragmatics division of labor. Most denotes 'a proper subset which is the largest subset given any partitioning of the complement subsets'. Thus, most's lexical meaning does provide an upper bound, but pragmatic inferences may nonetheless sometimes render its use compatible with states of affairs in which 'all' is true.
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.
The Handbook of Pragmatics is a collection of newly commissioned articles that provide an authoritative and accessible introduction to the field, including an overview of the foundations of pragmatic theory and a detailed examination of the rich and varied theoretical and empirical subdomains of pragmatics. Contains 32 newly commissioned articles that outline the central themes and challenges for current research in the field of linguistic pragmatics. Provides authoritative and accessible introduction to the field and a detailed examination of the varied theoretical and empirical subdomains of pragmatics. Includes extensive bibliography that serves as a research tool for those working in pragmatics and allied fields in linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science. Valuable resource for both students and professional researchers investigating the properties of meaning, reference, and context in natural language.
Literal meaning has been defined as linguistic meaning, i.e., as nonfigurative, coded, fully compositional, context-invariant, explicit, and truth conditional (Katz, Jerrold J., 1977. Pro-positional structure and illocutionary force. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell). Nonliteral meaning is seen as its counterpart, i.e., as extralinguistic, figurative, indirect, inferred, non-compositional, context-dependent, and cancelable. I argue that the requirements made on lit-eral meaning conflict with each other (e.g., coded vs. truth condtional; figurative vs. coded; inferred vs. literal). I then propose to replace the one concept of literal meaning with three concepts of minimal meanings. Each, I argue, reflects a different respect in which a meaning can be minimal. A meaning can be minimal because it is coded, compositional, and context-invariant—the linguistic meaning. A meaning can be minimal because psycholinguistically it is the one foremost on our mind—Giora's (Giora, Rachel, 1997. Understanding figurative and literal language: The graded salience hypothesis. Cognitive Linguistics 8: 183–206.) salient meaning. And a meaning can be minimal because it is the privileged interactional interpreta-tion communicated, namely what the speaker is seen as bound by, what constitutes her rele-vant contribution to the discourse (Ariel, Mira, 2002. Privileged interactional interpretations. Journal of Pragmatics, in press). # 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
This essay aims at neutralizing the contextualist challenge against traditional semantics. According to contextualism, utterances of non-elliptical, non-ambiguous, and non-indexical sentences may be associated with contrasting truth-conditions. In this essay, I grant the contextualist analysis of the sentences in question, and the contextualist assessment of the truth-conditions for the corresponding utterances. I then argue that the resulting situation is by no means incompatible with the traditional approach to semantics, and that the evidence put forth by the contextualists may easily be taken into account by the customary treatment of natural languages.
‘What-is-said’ was introduced as a technical term by Paul Grice in his William James lectures of 1967 as a way of drawing the line between what we know upon hearing an utterance based on our knowledge of the language, and ‘what is implicated’, i.e. what we can infer from the fact that an utterance has been made in context. Sometimes identified with the truth-conditional or propositional content of an utterance, ‘what-is-said’ is nowadays hotly contested between literalist and contextualist approaches to meaning and has been variously reformulated or even downright rejected. This article summarizes the relevant debates in post-Gricean pragmatics and presents some empirical evidence in favor of a literalist conception of ‘what-is-said’ as the content of the speaker’s locutionary act, which is prior to pragmatic enrichment and not cancellable.
Book description: This collection on François Recanati's philosophy of language deals with core issues in the contemporary philosophy of language. It includes topics as central as the existence of unarticulated constituents in what is literally said, the interface semantics and pragmatics, the existence and character of primary pragmatic processes in the formation of what is said, the status of the availability and cooperative principles, the compatibility between Gricean perspective about meaning and the externalist paradigm derived from the works of Kripke and Putnam, the difference between literal and non-literal uses of language, the status of the discourse of fiction.
Contributions written by distinguished specialists in linguistics and philosophy of language are each followed by Recanati's own comments and 'reply'. The current 'hot' concerns in the discipline, and the diverse ways in which it will develop in the future, are debated in lively style.
Book description: Thoughts and Utterances is the first sustained investigation of two distinctions which are fundamental to all theories of utterance understanding: the semantics/pragmatics distinction and the distinction between what is explicitly communicated and what is implicitly communicated.
* Features the first sustained investigation of both the semantics/pragmatics distinction and the distinction between what is explicitly and implicitly communicated in speech.
The aim of this paper is to contribute to the debate between contextualism and minimalism. I show that one of the main arguments against minimalism, which I called ¿argument of loss of generality of the notion of implicature¿, is based on a misunderstanding or a simplification of the mechanism of generation of conversational implicatures. El objetivo principal de este artículo es contribuir al debate entre contextualistas y minimistas, mostrando cómo uno de los principales argumentos en contra del minimismo, que denominaré el ¿Argumento de la pérdida de generalidad de la noción de implicatura¿, descansa en una mala comprensión o en una simplificación del mecanismo de generación de implicaturas conversacionales.
Introduction It is widely accepted that there is a distinction to be made between the explicit content and the implicit import of an utterance. There is much less agreement about the precise nature of this distinction, how it is to be drawn, and whether any such two-way distinction can do justice to the levels and kinds of meaning involved in utterance interpretation. Grice's distinction between what is said by an utterance and what is implicated is probably the best known instantiation of the explicit/implicit distinction. His distinction, along with many of its post-Gricean heirs, is closely entwined with another distinction: that between semantics and pragmatics. Indeed, on some construals they are seen as essentially one and the same; "what is said" is equated with the truthconditional content of the utterance which in turn is equated with (context-relative) sentence meaning, leaving implicatures (conventional and conversational) as the sole domain of pragmatics. This is emphatica
L'A. repond aux critiques des theoriciens de la reference qui, comme H. Wettstein, pensent que le probleme pose par Frege (si " l'etoile du soir = l'etoile du matin " a les memes conditions de verite que " l'etoile du soir = l'etoile du soir ", ces deux phrases n'ont pas la meme " signification cognitive ") menace la theorie de la reference directe, selon laquelle la reference des noms et des demonstratifs est directe et consiste dans leur denotation. Selon l'A., le theoricien de la referene directe peut maintenir sa these, tout en incorporant le phenomene de la signification cognitive dans la semantique
Modern empiricism has been conditioned in large part by two dogmas. One is a belief in some fundamental cleavage between truths which are analytic, or grounded in meanings independently of matters of fact, and truths which aresynthetic, or grounded in fact. The other dogma is reductionism: the belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some logical construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience. Both dogmas, I shall argue, are ill-founded. One effect of abandoning them is, as we shall see, a blurring of the supposed boundary between speculative metaphysics and natural science. Another effect is a shift toward pragmatism.
Part I. A Theory of Speech Acts: 1. Methods and scope 2. Expressions, meaning and speech acts 3. The structure of illocutionary acts 4. Reference as a speech act 5. Predication Part II. Some Applications of the Theory: 6. Three fallacies in contemporary philosophy 7. Problems of reference 8. Deriving 'ought' from 'is' Index.
Versions of this paper-not read from the present manuscript-were given from 1971 onward to colloquia at New York University, M.I.T., the University of California (Los Angeles), and elsewhere. The present version was written on the basis of a transcript of the M.I.T. version prepared by the editors of this volume. Donnellan himself heard the talk at U.C.L.A., and he has a forthcoming paper, “Speaker Reference, Descriptions and Anaphora,” that to a large extent appears to be a comment on considerations of the type mentioned here. (He does not, however, specifically refer to the present paper.) I decided not to alter the paper I gave in talks to take Donnellan's later views into account: largely I think the earlier version stands on its own, and the issues Donnellan raises in the later paper can be discussed elsewhere. Something should be said here, however, about the pronominalization phenomena mentioned on p. 270 below. In his forthcoming paper, Donnellan seems to think that these phenomena are incompatible with the suggestion that speaker's reference is a pragmatic notion. On the contrary, at the end of the present paper (and of the talk Donnellan heard), I emphasize these very phenomena and argue that they support this suggestion. See also footnote 31 below.
Literal meaning and context
- Berg
J. Berg / Journal of Pragmatics 34 (2002) 349–359 Berg, Jonathan, 1993. Literal meaning and context. Iyyun 42: 297–411.
Pragmatics A companion to the philosophy of language
- Charles Travis
Travis, Charles, 1997. Pragmatics. In: B. Hale and C. Wright, eds., A companion to the philosophy of language, 87–107.
Ueber sinn und bedeutung. Zeitschrift fur Philosophie und philosopphische
- Frege
- Gottlob
Frege, Gottlob, 1892. Ueber sinn und bedeutung. Zeitschrift fur Philosophie und philosopphische Kritik 100: 25–50.
A developmental study of the communication of meaning: The role of uncertainty and information The development of meaning
- P Greenfield
- C Dents
Greenfield, P. and C. Dents, 1979. A developmental study of the communication of meaning: The role of uncertainty and information. In: P.L. French, ed., The development of meaning, 300–337.
I thought of what I called an ‘automatic sweetheart
- Hilary Putnam
Putnam, Hilary, 1997. ''... I thought of what I called an 'automatic sweetheart' ''. Lecture I, Ben-Gurion University.
Jonathan Berg is in the philosophy department of the University of Haifa. He is the author of Applied Logic: Principles of Argument (in Hebrew) and numerous articles on topics in the philosophy of language, philosophical logic, and the philosophy of mind
- Oxford
Oxford: Blackwell. Jonathan Berg is in the philosophy department of the University of Haifa. He is the author of Applied Logic: Principles of Argument (in Hebrew) and numerous articles on topics in the philosophy of language, philosophical logic, and the philosophy of mind. J. Berg / Journal of Pragmatics 34 (2002) 349–359
Hilary Is semantics possible
- Putnam
Putnam, 1970. Hilary Is semantics possible? In: H. Kiefer and M. Munitz, eds., Languages, belief and metaphysics, 139–152. Press Albany: SUNY (Reprinted in H. Putnam, 1975. Mind, language and reality: Philosophical papers, Vol. 2, 139–52.
Speech acts Literal meaning
- Searle
- John
Searle, John, 1969. Speech acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Searle, John, 1978. Literal meaning. Erkenntnis 13: 207–24.
Meaning and necessity 2nd edition
- Carnap
Carnap, Rudolf, 1956. Meaning and necessity 2nd edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
A developmental study of the communication of meaning: The role of uncertainty and information
- Greenfield