A plea for pragmatics

Synthese 170 (1):155 - 167 (2009)
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Abstract

Let intentionalism be the view that what proposition is expressed in context by a sentence containing indexicals depends on the speaker’s intentions. It has recently been argued that intentionalism makes communicative success mysterious and that there are counterexamples to the intentionalist view in the form of cases of mismatch between the intended interpretation and the intuitively correct interpretation. In this paper, I argue that these objections can be met, once we acknowledge that we may distinguish what determines the correct interpretation from the evidence that is available to the audience, as well as from the standards by which we judge whether or not a given interpretation is reasonable. With these distinctions in place, we see that intentionalism does not render communicative success mysterious, and that cases of mismatch between the intended interpretation and the intuitively correct one can easily be accommodated. The distinction is also useful in treating the Humpty Dumpty problem for intentionalism, since it turns out that this can be treated as an extreme special case of mismatch.

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Jonas Åkerman
Stockholm University

Citations of this work

Ways of Using Words: On Semantic Intentions.Emanuel Viebahn - 2020 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 100 (1):93-117.
Testimony and the epistemic uncertainty of interpretation.Andrew Peet - 2016 - Philosophical Studies 173 (2):395-416.
Bullshit activities.Kenny Easwaran - forthcoming - Analytic Philosophy.
I Am Still Not Here Now.Stefano Predelli - 2011 - Erkenntnis 74 (3):289-303.

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References found in this work

I am not here now.Stefano Predelli - 1998 - Analysis 58 (2):107-115.
Who Is I?Eros Corazza, William Fish & Jonathan Gorvett - 2002 - Philosophical Studies 107 (1):1-21.
Zero tolerance for pragmatics.Christopher Gauker - 2008 - Synthese 165 (3):359–371.
Demonstratives, demonstrations, and demonstrata.Marga Reimer - 1991 - Philosophical Studies 63 (2):187--202.

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