Abstract

We give an overview of the arguments of our book Imagination and Convention, and explain how ideas from the book continue to inform our ongoing work. One theme is the challenge of fully accounting for the linguistic rules that guide interpretation. By attending to principles of discourse coherence and the many aspects of meaning that are linguistically encoded but are not truth conditional in nature, we get a much more constrained picture of context sensitivity in language than philosophers have typically assumed. Another theme is the heterogeneous nature of interpretive processes, as illustrated by the distinctive interpretive profile of metaphorical and poetic language. Such effects remind us that the suggestions and connotations of an utterance are often best explained in terms of the hearer’s experiential engagement with language, without appeal to propositional content that the speaker somehow signals either semantically or pragmatically.