Overlooking Conventions: The Trouble with Linguistic Pragmatism

ISBN-13: 9783030706555 / Angielski / Miękka / 2022

Michael Devitt

Opis

This book criticizes the methodology of the recent semantics-pragmatics debate in the theory of language and proposes an alternative. It applies this methodology to argue for a traditional view against a group of “contextualists” and “pragmatists”, including Sperber and Wilson, Bach, Carston, Recanati, Neale, and many others.  The author disagrees with these theorists who hold that the meaning of the sentence in an utterance never, or hardly ever, yields its literal truth-conditional content, even after disambiguation and reference fixing; it needs to be pragmatically supplemented in context.The standard methodology of this debate is to consult intuitions. The book argues that theories should be tested against linguistic usage. Theoretical distinctions, however intuitive, need to be scientifically motivated. Also we should not be guided by Grice’s “Modified Occam’s Razor”, Ruhl’s “Monosemantic Bias”, or other such strategies for “meaning denialism”. From this novel perspective, the striking examples of context relativity that motivate contextualists and pragmatists typically exemplify semantic rather than pragmatic properties. In particular, polysemous phenomena should typically be treated as semantic ambiguity. The author argues that conventions have been overlooked, that there’s no extensive “semantic underdetermination” and that the new theoretical framework of “truth-conditional pragmatics” is a mistake.

Spis treści

PREFACE

CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION

1.1 Background

1.2 Summary of Chapters

CHAPTER 2: RELIANCE ON INTUITIONS:

2.1 The Received View

2.2 The Task?

2.3 Experimental Semantics 

2.4 “Cartesianism”

2.5 A Priori Knowledge?

2.6 Embodied Theory?

2.7 Competence as a Skill

2.8 Intuitions as Empirical Judgments

2.9 Rejecting “Voice of Competence”

2.11 Conclusion

CHAPTER 3: THE SEMANTICS-PRAGMATICS DISTINCTION

3.1 Introduction

3.2 The Theoretical Motivation

3.2.1 Human Thoughts

3.2.2 Animal Communication

3.2.3 Human Language

3.2.4 Our Theoretical Interest in a Language

3.3 Terminology

3.4 Communication

3.5 The Semantics-Pragmatics Dispute

3.6 The Evidence

3.7 Conclusion

CHAPTER 4: SPEAKER MEANINGS AND INTENTIONS

4.1 Intending to Refer

4.1.1 Objection 1: Implausible Starting Point

4.1.2 Objection 2: Incomplete

4.1.3 Objection 3: Redundant

4.1.4 Objection 4: Misleading

4.2 Intending to Communicate

4.3. Constraints on Intentions

CHAPTER 5: LINGUISTIC CONVENTIONS AND LANGUAGE

PART I: THE POSITION

5.1 Conventions and Linguistic Meanings

5.2 Linguistic Conventions

PART II: CONVENTION DENIERS

5.3 Collins Against Conventions

5.4 Chomsky Against Linguistic Conventions

5.5 Chomsky against Common Languages

5.6 Davidson, Malapropisms, Spoonerisms, and Slips

CHAPTER 6: BACH AND NEALE ON “WHAT IS SAID”

PART I: BACH

6.1 Bach’s Notion

6.2 Criticisms of Bach

6.3 Bach’s Response

PART II: NEALE

6.4 Neale’s Notion

6.5 Criticisms of Neale

CHAPTER 7: CONFUSION OF THE METAPHYSICS OF MEANING WITH THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF INTERPRETATION

PART I: THE CONFUSION

7.1 The Meaning/Interpretation Distinction

7.2 Confusing Meaning and Interpretation

7.3 Examples of the Confusion

7.3.1 Jason Stanley and Zoltan Szabo

7.3.2 Dan Sperber and Deidre Wilson

7.3.3 François Recanati 

7.3.4 Anne Bezuidenhout

7.3.5 Robert Stainton

7.3.6 Kepa Korta and John Perry 

7.4 A Principled Position?

PART II: DEFENDING THE CONFUSION

7.5 Elugardo and Stainton’s Defense

7.6 Tidying Up the Defense

7.7 Two Major Failings of the Defense

CHAPTER 8: MODIFIED OCCAM’S RAZOR AND THE DENIAL OF LINGUISTIC MEANINGS

8.1 Embracing the Razor

8.2 The Falsity of the Razor (as Commonly Construed)

8.3 The Explanatory Onus

8.4 Objections to Semantic Polysemy

8.4.1 The Failure of the tests

8.4.2 Too Psychologically Demanding

8.4.3 Distinguishing Polysemy From Homonymy

8.4.4 Nunberg on the Arbitrariness of Meanings

8.5 Bach on the Razor

8.6 Bach’s “Standardization”

CHAPTER 9: REFERENTIAL DESCRIPTIONS: A CASE STUDY

9.1 Introduction

9.2 The Argument from Convention

9.3 The Incompleteness Argument Against Pragmatic Explanations

9.4 Bach’s Pragmatic Defense of Russell

9.5 Bach’s Response

9.6 Three Further Arguments for Semantic or against Pragmatic Explanations

9.7 Neale’s Illusion

9.8 Conclusion

CHAPTER 10: SATURATION AND PRAGMATISM’S CHALLENGE

10.1 Introduction

10.2 Truth-Conditional Pragmatics

10.3 Meaning Eliminativism

10.4 Implicit Saturation

10.5 The Tyranny of Syntax

10.6 Perry’s “Unarticulated Constituents”

CHAPTER 11: POLYSEMY AND PRAGMATISM’S CHALLENGE

11.1 Polysemy

11.2 Semantic Polysemy

11.3 Polysemy in Psycholinguistics

                                11.3.1 “Represented and Stored”

                11.3.2 An “Information-Rich” Lexicon?

11.4 Objections to Semantic Polysemy

11.5 Polysemy and the Experimental Evidence

11.6 Whither Linguistic Pragmatism?

CHAPTER 12: SUB-SENTENTIALS: PRAGMATICS OR SEMANTICS?

12.1 Introduction

12.2 Implicit Demonstratives

12.3 The Role of Demonstrations

12.4 Other Examples

12.5. The Syntactic Ellipsis Objection

12.5.1 Introduction

12.5.2(A): The Syntactic Ellipsis Assumption

12.5.3 (B): No Syntactic Ellipsis in (1) to (5)

12.6. Stainton’s Other Objections

12.6.1 Too Much Ambiguity

12.6.2 No Explanatory Work

12.6.3 Fails a Kripkean Test

12.7. The Assertion of Propositional Fragments

12.8 Conclusion

O autorze

Michael Devitt is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of CUNY. He is the author of the following books: Designation (1981); Realism and Truth (1984/1991/1997); Language and Reality (with Kim Sterelny, 1987/1999); Coming to Our Senses (1996); Ignorance of Language (2006); Putting Metaphysics First (2010); Biological Essentialism (forthcoming). He has co-edited (with Richard Hanley) The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Language (2006)