In pragmatic theories, the notion of inference plays a central role, together with the communicative act in which it is activated. Although some scholars, such as Levinson, Sperber and Wilson, propose detailed and accurate analyses of this notion, we will maintain that these analyses can be better systematized if seen through Peirce’s notion of abduction. We will try to maintain that the variety of inferential processes in play in a linguistic act is mostly of an abductive nature. Moreover, (...) we will maintain that the typological tripartition of abductions discussed by Eco allows to account for a significant part of the mechanisms involved in the comprehension of an utterance, ranging from quasi-immediate and spontaneous levels of understanding to processes that draw on creative resources. In our proposal the vast majority of our linguistic activities implies the automatic retrieval of a habit of action. In the other cases we need more onerous processes. We might need to identify, among a range of possibilities, the appropriate rule to be applied to the contextual situation or, depending on the context and on our background knowledge, we might be forced to create ex novo a new linguistic routine. In our view, this typology of abductive inferences provides us with all the necessary tools to account for the different inferential demands entailed by different levels of the process of language comprehension. On the basis of this typology we can, develop a fine-grained model of linguistic inferences and, thus, simplify the terms of some problematic nodes debated within contextualist approaches.The benefits of this fine-grained model is that it provides a unitary framework in which all the levels of the process of language comprehension are shown to be inferential and have the same logic structure. At the same time, it is also able to account for all the different inferential efforts entailed by different linguistic processes. Thus, this model gives us both a unitary account of the structure of linguistic inferences and a fine-grained description of the differences existing between them. (shrink)

Counterfactual conditionals are frequently used in language to express potentially valid reasoning from factually false suppositions. Counterfactuals provide two pieces of information: their literal meaning expresses a suppositional dependency between an antecedent (If the dice had been rigged...) and a consequent (… then the game would have been unfair). Their second, backgrounded meaning refers to the opposite state of affairs and suggests that, in fact, the dice were not rigged and the game was fair. Counterfactual antecedents are particularly intriguing because (...) they set up a counterfactual world which is known to be false, but which is nevertheless kept to when evaluating the conditional’s consequent. In the last years several event-related potential (ERP) studies have targeted the processing of counterfactual consequents, yet counterfactual antecedents have remained unstudied. We present an EEG/ERP investigation which employed German conditionals to compare subjunctive mood (which marks counterfactuality) with indicative mood at the critical point of mood disambiguation via auxiliary introduction in the conditional’s antecedent. Conditional sentences were presented visually one word at a time. Participants completed an acceptability judgement and probe detection task which was not related to the critical manipulation of linguistic mood. ERPs at the point of mood disambiguation in the antecedent were compared between indicative and subjunctive. Our main finding is a transient negative deflection in frontal regions for subjunctive compared to indicative mood in a time-window of 450-600 ms. We discuss this novel finding in respect to working memory requirements for rule application and increased referential processing demands for the representation of counterfactuals’ dual meaning. Our result suggests that the counterfactually implied dual meaning is processed without any delay at the earliest point where counterfactuality is marked by subjunctive mood. (shrink)

The debate between literalism and contextualism bears on the (in-)existence of ‘free' pragmatic processes, i.e. pragmatic processes of interpretation which contribute to shaping intuitive truth-conditional content without being mandated by anything in the sentence itself. In his new book John Collins defends the contextualist position. He focusses on so-called ‘unarticulated constituents' (e.g. the unmentioned location of rain in a statement like ‘It is raining’) and argues against the idea that the existence of certain bound readings for (...) the implicit component entails the presence of a covert variable in the syntax to which the alleged unarticulated constituent is assigned as semantic value. In the absence of properly syntactic evidence, Collins says, 'judgments about semantic readings are invariably amenable to a pragmatic explanation'. In a recent paper, however, Paul Elbourne offers the sort of evidence which Collins says would be needed to support the literalist position. On Collins' behalf, I discuss, and rebut, the evidence offered by Elbourne. In the last section, I argue against Collins that optionality is a better criterion than unarticulatedness for establishing that a given meaning component results from a free pragmatic process. (shrink)

Gricean pragmatics has often been criticised for being implausible from a psychological point of view. This line of criticism is never backed up by empirical evidence, but more importantly, it ignores the fact that Grice never meant to advance a processing theory, in the first place. Taking our lead from Marr, we distinguish between two levels of explanation: at the W-level, we are concerned with what agents do and why; at the H-level, we ask how agents do whatever it is (...) they do. Whereas pragmatics is pitched at the W-level, processing theories are at the H-level. This is not to say that pragmatics has no implications for psychology at all, but it is to say that its implications are less direct than is often supposed. (shrink)

The notion of schema has been given a major role by Recanati within his conception of primary pragmatic processes, conceived as a type of associative process. I intend to show that Recanati’s considerations on schemata may challenge the relevance theorist’s argument against associative explanations in pragmatics, and support an argument in favor of associative (versus inferential) explanations. More generally, associative relations can be shown to be schematic, that is, they have enough structure to license inferential effects without any (...) appeal to genuine inferential processes. Associative processes are thus able to explain a number of pragmatic and linguistic phenomena which have instead been thought to require specialized inferential processes. (shrink)

Pragmatic clinical trials are a relatively new methodological approach to the execution of clinical research that can increase research efficiency and provide access to unique data. Some have suggested that the costs and delays associated with obtaining informed consent could make PCTs difficult or even impossible to execute. Alternative consent models have been proposed, some of which lower standards of disclosure, delay consent, or waive it altogether. We analyze the permissibility of changes to informed consent in the context of (...) Canadian research ethics policies, legislation, common law, professional codes of ethics, and professional standards of practice. We find that Canadian law and policy relating to informed consent clearly applies to any clinician who might be involved in a PCT. In addition, existing consent norms seem unable to accommodate alternative consent models for pragmatic research if such models would involve lowering the standard of disclosure. The strong emphasis on the primacy... (shrink)

A model of metaphor processing is suggested based on the application of pragmatic principles to the type of semantic information easy to access. It is argued that, with metaphor, higher-order categorical knowledge is given processing preference over instance-specific knowledge in an attempt to recover likely intended meaning. Instance-specific information is used more often when the higher-order knowledge is taken to violate conversational postulates. One such violation occurs when the categories implicated by metaphor topic and vehicle are similar, and thus (...) unlikely to provide new or relevant information. It is argued further that these differences could, in part, explain at least one condition that produces the asymmetry observed in metaphor when topic and vehicle are reversed. Predictions supportive of the model were obtained in three studies, employing different methodologies: feature listing, recognition memory and a vehicle choice task. (shrink)

Unique in both perspective and approach, this is the first book to use classical American pragmatism as an ethical framework for dealing with ethical issues in business. The book first explores ethical theory from both the traditional and pragmatic perspectives. Then, using the pragmatic perspective, discusses the nature of the corporation and its relationship to society, the various environments in which business functions, and specific issues in the contemporary marketplace and workplace.

'If' is one of the most important words in the English language, being used to express hypothetical thought. The use of conditional terms such as 'if' distinguishes human intelligence from that of all other animals. In this volume, Jonathan Evans and David Over present a new theoretical approach to understanding conditionals. The book draws on studies from the psychology of judgement and decision making, as well as philosophical logic.

Philosophical Psychology, Volume 25, Issue 4, Page 623-627, August 2012.

Pragmatic processes crucially rely on background or contextual information supplied by the hearer, which may significantly affect the outcome of the comprehension process. Construed as a branch of cognitive psychology, pragmatics is the study of the cognitive systems apart from the I‐language and the parser which enable speaker and hearer (or communicator and audience) to co‐ordinate on the intended interpretation, and this is how we propose to treat it here. This chapter considers some of Noam Chomsky's suggestions about (...) how the cognitive systems underlying human abilities might be investigated. It discusses his reasons and consider how far this skepticism may be due to his particular conception of pragmatics. The chapter outlines an approach to pragmatics that seems to be compatible with his general methodology and is based on an alternative conception of pragmatics that we sketch out. (shrink)

The central problem for pragmatics is that sentence meaning vastly underdetermines speaker’s meaning. The goal of pragmatics is to explain how the gap between sentence meaning and speaker’s meaning is bridged. This paper defends the broadly Gricean view that pragmatic interpretation is ultimately an exercise in mind-reading, involving the inferential attribution of intentions. We argue, however, that the interpretation process does not simply consist in applying general mind-reading abilities to a particular (communicative) domain. Rather, it involves a dedicated comprehension (...) module, with its own special principles and mechanisms. We show how such a metacommunicative module might have evolved, and what principles and mechanisms it might contain. (shrink)

Polysemy, understood as instances of a single linguistic expression having multiple related senses, is not a homogenous phenomenon. There are regular (apparently, rule‐based) cases and irregular (resemblance‐based) cases, which have different processing profiles. Although a primary source of polysemy is pragmatic inference, at least some cases become conventionalised and linguistically encoded. Three main issues are discussed: (a) the key differences between regular and irregular cases and the role, if any, of a “core meaning”; (b) the distinction between pragmatic (...) polysemy and semantic polysemy; and (c) the role of syntactic meaning in both generating and constraining polysemy. (shrink)

This paper offers a politolinguistic analysis of four ‘state of the nation’ speeches delivered by the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán between 1999 and 2002. The analysis focuses on the ways in which Orbán’s self-representation, his discourse strategies and the tone of the speeches changed in response to changes in the ideological background over the four years in question. The findings demonstrate that Orbán’s voice was most active in the pre-election speech of 2002, that he had become increasingly interpellative (in (...) the Althusserian sense) over this period and that he increasingly tried to conversationalize the dominant ideology. (shrink)

Cognitive science is experiencing a pragmatic turn away from the traditional representation-centered framework toward a view that focuses on understanding cognition as "enactive." This enactive view holds that cognition does not produce models of the world but rather subserves action as it is grounded in sensorimotor skills. In this volume, experts from cognitive science, neuroscience, psychology, robotics, and philosophy of mind assess the foundations and implications of a novel action-oriented view of cognition. Their contributions and supporting experimental evidence show (...) that an enactive approach to cognitive science enables strong conceptual advances, and the chapters explore key concepts for this new model of cognition. The contributors discuss the implications of an enactive approach for cognitive development; action-oriented models of cognitive processing; action-oriented understandings of consciousness and experience; and the accompanying paradigm shifts in the fields of philosophy, brain science, robotics, and psychology. ContributorsMoshe Bar, Lawrence W. Barsalov, Olaf Blanke, Jeannette Bohg, Martin V. Butz, Peter F. Dominey, Andreas K. Engel, Judith M. Ford, Karl J. Friston, Chris D. Frith, Shaun Gallagher, Antonia Hamilton, Tobias Heed, Cecilia Heyes, Elisabeth Hill, Matej Hoffmann, Jakob Hohwy, Bernhard Hommel, Atsushi Iriki, Pierre Jacob, Henrik Jörntell, Jürgen Jost, James Kilner, Günther Knoblich, Peter König, Danica Kragic, Miriam Kyselo, Alexander Maye, Marek McGann, Richard Menary, Thomas Metzinger, Ezequiel Morsella, Saskia Nagel, Kevin J. O'Regan, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, Giovanni Pezzulo, Tony J. Prescott, Wolfgang Prinz, Friedemann Pulvermüller, Robert Rupert, Marti Sanchez-Fibla, Andrew Schwartz, Anil K. Seth, Vicky Southgate, Antonella Tramacere, John K. Tsotsos, Paul F. M. J. Verschure, Gabriella Vigliocco, Gottfried Vosgerau. (shrink)

It has long ben recognised that there are referential uses of definite descriptions. It is not as widely recognised that there are atttributives uses of idexicals and other such paradigmatically singular terms. I offer an account of the referential/attributive distinction which is intended to give a unified treatment of both sorts of cases. I argue that the best way to account for the referential/attributive distinction is to treat is as semantically underdetermined which sort of propositions is expressed in a context. (...) In certain contexts the proposition expressed will be a descriptive one, and in others it will be an object-dependent one. I appeal to Sperer and Wilson's (1986) idea that the recovery of the content of an utterance involves pragmatic processes of enrichment of a representation of the logical form of utterance. According to the account I offer, the first-level descriptive meaning associated with an expression (whether this is an indexical or a definite description) is pragmatically enriched and then used either to track an individual in the context, or is taken to lay down a condition of satisfaction for an individual. The proposition that the listener takes the speaker to have expressed is recovered on the basis of considerations of relevance and contextually available information about the speaker's directive intentions. Although my account has affinities with those of Recanati (1993) and Nunberg (1993), it also differs from theirs in crucial ways. Each of these authors sees asymmetries where I see none. I give reasons for preferring my symmetrical account. (shrink)

It is commonly held that all truth-conditional effects of context result from a pragmatic process of value-assignment that is triggered (and made obligatory) by something in the sentence itself, namely a lexically context-sensitive expression (e.g. an indexical) or a free variable in logical form. Such a process has been dubbed ‘saturation'. It stands in contrast to so called ‘free' pragmatic processes, which are supposed to take place for purely pragmatic reasons — in order to make sense (...) of what the speaker is saying. For example, the pragmatic process through which an expression is given a nonliteral (e.g. a metaphorical or metonymical) interpretation is context-driven: we interpret an expression nonliterally in order to make sense of the speech act, not because this is dictated by the linguistic materials in virtue of the rules of the language. The dominant view, then, is that no free pragmatic process can affect truth-conditions — such processes can only affect what the speaker means (but not what she says). But there is a dissenting position, according to which free pragmatic processes can take place locally and interact with semantic composition, thereby affecting truth-conditions. Three such processes have been discussed in the literature : pragmatic enrichment, predicate transfer, and loosening/broadening. Sometimes ‘pragmatic enrichment' is used as a cover term for these modulation processes because, on a certain understanding, they all result from ‘enriching' the logical representation which is the output of the translational phase of semantic interpretation. The paper presents an overview of this research area. (shrink)

Different notions of multiple rationalities have recently been applied to describe the phenomena of co-existence of competing rationalities in organizations. These include institutional pluralism, institutional logics, competing rationalities and pluralistic contexts. The French pragmatic sociologists Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot have contributed to this line of research with a sophisticated theoretical framework of orders of worth, which has been applied in an increasing number of empirical studies. This article explores how the order of worth framework has been applied to (...) empirical studies of organizations. First, I summarize the basic ideas of the framework, stressing the aspects of special relevance for studies of organizations. Second, I review the empirical studies focusing on the coexistence of competing orders of worth in organizations showing that the order of worth framework primarily has been related to three main themes in organizational research: non-profit and co-operative organizations, inter-organizational co-operation, and organizational change. Third, I discuss how the pragmatic, process-oriented aspect of the research program, focusing on the intertwining of values and action in various forms of ‘justification work’, has been translated into empirical studies. I argue that even if highly interesting empirical studies have begun to appear on the pragmatic aspects of the order of worth program, empirical studies of ‘justification work’ may be a potentially very promising focus for future empirical studies. (shrink)

In this article, I propose an inquisitive approach to semantic underdetermination using the model of issue resolution to describe how occasion meanings are determined in the process of pragmatic enrichment. I appeal to “Travis cases” to motivate the account of semantic underdetermination based on alternative ways for some objectato be F. When interpreting a sentence, we look how to narrow down the space of metalinguistic alternatives and achieve the state where a metalinguistic issue is resolved. I suggest that, in (...) doing this, we primarily rely on contextual domain goals, preferring those alternatives which are conducive to the goal. (shrink)

This book argues against the traditional understanding of the semantics/pragmatics divide and puts forward a radical alternative. Through half a dozen case studies, it shows that what an utterance says cannot be neatly separated from what the speaker means. In particular, the speaker's meaning endows words with senses that are tailored to the situation of utterance and depart from the conventional meanings carried by the words in isolation. This phenomenon of ‘pragmatic modulation’ must be taken into account in theorizing (...) about semantic content, for it interacts with the grammar-driven process of semantic composition. Because of that interaction, the book argues, the content of a sentence always depends upon the context in which it is used. This claim defines Contextualism, a view which has attracted considerable attention in recent years, and of which the author of this book is one of the main proponents. (shrink)

In the evolutionary theory, a central tenet is that complex forms evolved from simpler ones, according to a bottom-up process. When it comes to the evolution of language, however, a bottom-up approach is problematic. In this case, such an approach often assumes that minimal units that are inflexibly associated to their meaning come first, where the wider discourse is only a later product. In the present paper, I shall argue that we need to assume a top-down perspective on language evolution, (...) which claims that the wider discourse is the evolutionary starting point rather than the final achievement. This approach involves the necessity to focus on the pragmatic abilities of our ancestors and on the biological mechanisms underlying them. Combining a top-down model of language evolution with an embodied account of cognition, I shall argue that a basic mechanism of affordance perception supports core pragmatic processes by enabling the individual to determine not only her own action possibilities in the physical environment but also the action possibilities of others and, thereby, enabling her to determine other people’s intentions. As a result, I shall introduce the notion of an embodied pragmatics as a key to account for the evolution of language. (shrink)

This paper considers the potentially important role played by non-verbal communication in constraining pragmatic processing. Attention is paid to claims about the role of emotion in memory encoding and recall, its role in the formulation of plans and goals, and the creation of a shared emotional sense through various interpersonal processes. It is argued that ignoring these factors can lead to pragmatic theories which overestimate the processing demands facing the conversationalist, and that this overestimation will be problematic (...) for any systems which seek to build on these theories in the future. (shrink)

Pragmatic deficits of persons with autism spectrum disorders [ASDs] are often traced back to a dysfunction in Theory of Mind. However, the exact nature of the link between pragmatics and mindreading in autism is unclear. Pragmatic deficits in ASDs are not homogenous: in particular, while inter-subjective dimensions are affected, some other pragmatic capacities seem to be relatively preserved. Moreover, failure on classical false-belief tasks stems from executive problems that go beyond belief attribution; false-belief tasks require taking an (...) alternative perspective on the reality. While this capacity is functional in typically developing young children, it is impaired in ASDs. Typically developing children are capable of taking their interlocutor's perspective into account when communicating, whereas poor cognitive flexibility makes it difficult for persons with ASDs to grasp the inter-subjective character of communicative stimuli. This analysis predicts that those pragmatic processes that amount to merely taking into account salient contextual facts during utterance interpretation, without necessarily adopting the interlocutor's perspective, may be preserved in ASDs. (shrink)

It is generally agreed that constructions of the form “if P, Q” are capable of conveying a number of different relations between antecedent and consequent, with pragmatics playing a central role in determining these relations. Controversy concerns what the conventional contribution of the if-clause is, how it constrains the pragmatic processes, and what those processes are. In this essay, I begin to argue that the conventional contribution of if-clauses to semantics is exhausted by the fact that these (...) clauses introduce a proposition without presenting it as true so that the consequent can be understood in relation to it. Given our cognitive interests in such non-truth-presentational introductions, conditionals will make salient the wide but nevertheless disciplined variety of contents that we naturally attribute to them; no further substantial constraints of the sorts proposed by standard theories of conditionals are needed to explain the phenomena. If this is correct, it provides prima facie evidence for a radically contextualist account of conditionals according to which conditionals have no truth-evaluable or intuitively complete content absent some contextually provided, sufficiently salient relation between antecedent and consequent. (shrink)

n the philosophy of language, there are many ongoing controversies that stem from relying too heavily on an utterance-based framework. The traditional approach of rigidly partitioning the utterance’s meaning into what is grammatically determined from what is not may not fully capture the complexity of human language in real-world communicative contexts. To address this issue, we suggest shifting focus toward a broader analysis level encompassing conversations and discourses. From this broader perspective, it is possible to obtain a more integrated view (...) of how linguistic and extra-linguistic aspects dynamically interact and thus reconsider semantics/pragmatics dichotomy as complementary dimensions. Meaning is not confined to linguistic structures alone but emerges from the dynamic interplay of words, sociocultural knowledge, discursive situations, and psychological dispositions of speakers. Substantiating this perspective calls for embracing an interdisciplinary approach that synthesizes research from various domains, including linguistics, cognitive psychology, and philosophy of language. This paper focuses on a particularly compelling case study: aphasia. Speeches produced by individuals with aphasia represent complex scenarios where the balance between linguistic and extra-linguistic aspects is notably compromised, often to the former’s detriment. Aphasics’ productions represent a vivid example of how the interpretation of speeches can be far from involving fixed and static operations. Instead, it entails continuously reallocating cognitive resources toward the most readily available and accessible sources for the speakers. This case study ultimately demonstrates that the influence of semantic and pragmatic processes in shaping and conveying meanings displays remarkable adaptability, continuously adjusting to the ever changing demands placed upon speakers. -/- . (shrink)

The theory of human moral evolution elaborated in the later work of Jürgen Habermas represents one of the most challenging and provocative of recent, linguistically inspired attempts to reinterpret our understanding of Western history. In critically examining this theory, the present article identifies some major problems with Habermas's reinterpretation of the history of the formation of Western civilization as the universal pragmatic process of the evolution of human moral communicative competences. Drawing on the works of Norbert Elias and Michel (...) Foucault, the article seeks to show how the formal grounding of Habermas's evolutionary theory in the categories of his universal pragmatic conception of communicative action ultimately prevents him from grasping the radically embodied nature of human discursive practice and its implications for the historical process of the formation of human moral will. (shrink)

Robyn Carston and I share a general methodological position which I call ‘Truth-Conditional Pragmatics' (TCP). TCP is the view that the effects of context on truth-conditional content need not be traceable to the linguistic material in the uttered sentence. Some effects of context on truth-conditional content are due to the linguistic material (e.g. to context-sensitive words or morphemes which trigger the search for contextual values), but others result from ‘free' pragmatic processes. Free pragmatic processes take place (...) not because the linguistic material demands it, but because the utterance's content is not faithfully or wholly encoded in the uttered sentence, whose meaning requires adjustment or elaboration in order to determine an admissible content for the speaker's utterance. To make room for these processes, I will argue, we need to distinguish the logical form of an utterance, in the standard sense, and its modified logical form, affected by free pragmatic processes. This distinction will be elaborated and I will show that it can be interpreted in three different ways. (shrink)

This paper explores the hypothesis that first-order linguistic activities are better understood in terms of ecological, values-realizing dynamics rather than in terms of rule-governed processes. Conversing, like other perception-action skills is constrained by multiple values, heterarchically organized. This hypothesis is explored in terms of three broad approaches that contrast with models of language which view it as a cognitive system: conversing as a perceptual system for exploring dialogical arrays ; conversing as an action system for integrating diverse space-time scales (...) ; and conversing as a caring system for embodying the context-sensitivity and interdependency necessary to realize values. Approaching language as a caring action-perception system leads to a reconsideration of cognitive dimensions of linguistic activities, including consciousness, pragmatics, suffering, and hope. (shrink)

Grice proposed to investigate 'the total signification of the utterance'. One persistent criticism of Grice's taxonomy of signification is that he missed an important category of information. This content, and/or the process of providing it, goes by a variety of labels: 'generalized implicature', 'explicature', 'unarticulated constituents', 'default heuristics', 'impliciture'. In this study we first take a sample of such phenomena and, from the point of view of pure pragmatics, survey the central descriptions of the content expressed and the mechanisms that (...) might deliver these contents. We then, from the point of view of experimental pragmatics, focus on two accounts: Levinson's I-heuristic, and Bach's standardization. We find experimental evidence for the existence of such implicitures, and for the use of language specific standardizations over language neutral background information. (shrink)

Language and Theory of Mind come together in communication, but their relationship has been intensely contested. I hypothesize that pragmatic markers connect language and Theory of Mind and enable their co-development and co-evolution through a positive feedback loop, whereby the development of one skill boosts the development of the other. I propose to test this hypothesis by investigating two types of pragmatic markers: demonstratives and articles. Pragmatic markers are closed-class words that encode non-representational information that is unavailable (...) to consciousness, but accessed automatically in processing. These markers have been associated with implicit Theory of Mind because they are used to establish joint attention and mark shared knowledge. Here I develop a theoretical account of how joint attention is the basis for children’s later tracking of common ground. The developmental path from joint attention to common ground parallels language change, with demonstrative forms giving rise to definite articles. This parallel opens the possibility of modelling the emergence of Theory of Mind in human development in tandem with its routinization across language communities and generations of speakers. I therefore propose that, in order to understand the relationship between language and Theory of Mind, we should study pragmatics at three parallel timescales: during language acquisition, language use, and language change. (shrink)

Pragmatic sociology is often read as a reaction to and an alternative to Bourdieu’s ‘critical sociology’. This article, in contrast, offers an assessment of pragmatic sociology in terms of its contribution to the theory of culture in general and its affinities with repertoire theory in particular. Whereas the tendency has been to conceive of repertoires as largely unstructured entities, pragmatic sociology has demonstrated a systematic interest in their internal contents and structure, which it has even expanded through (...) its more recent turn to historical and macro comparative analysis. In the process, however, pragmatic sociology has also been leaning towards a form of cultural sociology that actually challenges some major aspects of repertoire theory–thus also bringing into relief the dilemmas facing any attempt at further elaboration of what is now a growing strand of cultural theory. (shrink)

Millianism is the view that the semantic content of a proper name is its semantic referent. Empty names, names with no semantic referents, raise various problems for Millianism. To solve these problems, many have appealed to pragmatics, thus ‘Pragmatic Millianism’. Pragmatic Millianism employs the relation of association between names and descriptions as well as some pragmatic processes to substitute empty names with descriptions associated with. The resultant content should account for the intuitions raised by utterances of (...) sentences containing empty names. Here, I will try to argue against this picture: Names are associated with descriptions of different kinds in a number of ways. The complex nature of this relation is overlooked by Pragmatic Millianism. Neither the relation of association nor the pragmatic processes responsible for substituting a description or a cluster of descriptions for an empty name guarantee the fullness of what is pragmatically imparted. The moral is this: Regarding empty names, Pragmatic Millianism should be avoided. (shrink)

The reasoning process of analogy is characterized by a strict interdependence between a process of abstraction of a common feature and the transfer of an attribute of the Analogue to the Primary Subject. The first reasoning step is regarded as an abstraction of a generic characteristic that is relevant for the attribution of the predicate. The abstracted feature can be considered from a logic-semantic perspective as a functional genus, in the sense that it is contextually essential for the attribution of (...) the predicate, i.e. that is pragmatically fundamental (i.e. relevant) for the predica-tion, or rather the achievement of the communicative intention. While the transfer of the predicate from the Analogue to the analogical genus and from the genus to the Primary Subject is guaranteed by the maxims (or rules of inference) governing the genus-species relation, the connection between the genus and the predicate can be complex, characterized by various types of reasoning patterns. The relevance relation can hide implicit arguments, such as an implicit argument from classification , an evaluation based on values, consequences or rules, a causal relation, or an argument from practical reasoning. (shrink)

Most explanations of beliefs are epistemically or pragmatically rationalizing. The distinction between these two types involves the explainer's differing expectations of how the believer will behave in the face of counter-evidence. This feature suggests that rationalizing explanations portray beliefs as either a consequence of the believer's following a norm, or part of a sub-intentional goal-oriented system. Which properly characterizes pragmatic believing? If there were pragmatic norms for believing, I argue, they would not be consciously followable. Yet an unallowable (...) norm is not a norm at all, and so I conclude that there are no such norms and that pragmatic believing is a sub-intentional, and not a norm-driven, process. /// La mayoría de las explicaciones de las creencias racionalizan de forma epistémica o pragmática. La distinción entre estas dos involucra las diferentes expectativas del que explica acerca de cómo se comportará el creyente frente a evidencia contraria. Este rasgo sugiere que las explicaciones racionalizadoras toman las creencias o bien como una consecuencia de que el creyente siga una norma, o bien como parte de su sistema subintencional orientado a fines. ¿Cuàl caracteriza de manera apropiada el creer pragmático? Aquí argumento que si hubiera normas pragmáticas para creer, no se podrían seguir conscientemente; sin embargo, una norma no seguible no es una norma en ningún sentido, por lo que concluyo que no existen tales normas y que el creer pragmático es un proceso subintencional y no un proceso guiado por normas. (shrink)

The concept of meaning, since Frege initiated the linguistic turn in 1884, has been the subject of numerous theories, hypotheses, methodologies and distinctions. One distinction of considerable strategic value relates to the location of meaning: some aspects of meaning can be found in language and are modelled with semantic values of various kinds; some aspects of meaning can be found in communicative processes and are modelled with pragmatic inferences of one sort or another. One hypothesis of great heuristic (...) utility concerns the relationship that is assumed between the semantic and the pragmatic. This collection of especially commissioned papers examines current thinking on the plausible nature of the semantic, the possible character of the pragmatic and the mechanics of their intersection. (shrink)