Overlooking Conventions: The Trouble With Linguistic Pragmatism: 29 (Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, 29) - Hardcover

Devitt, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 3030706524 ISBN 13: 9783030706524

Publisher: Springer, 2021

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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)

From the Back Cover

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.

Edition details

• Publisher: Springer
• Publication date: 2021
• ISBN 10: 3030706524
• ISBN 13: 9783030706524
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 339