Volume 15, Issue 2 - Thematic Issue: Pragmatics and Philosophy (TIPP), Editor: Alessandro Capone

There is no doubt that pragmatic theory and philosophy of language are mutually relevant and intrinsically connected. The main question I address in this paper is how exactly they are interconnected in terms of (i) their respective objectives, (ii) explanans – explanandum relation, (iii) methods of enquiry, and (iv) drawing on associated disciplines. In the introductory part I attempt to bring some order into the diversity of use of such labels as philosophical logic, philosophical semantics, philosophical pragmatics, linguistic philosophy, or philosophy of linguistics, among others. In the following sections I focus on philosophical pragmatics as a branch of philosophy of language (pragmatics PPL ) and the trends and theories it gave rise to, discussing them against the background of methodology of science and in particular paradigms and paradigm shifts as identified in natural science. In the main part of the paper I address the following questions: How is pragmatics PPL to be delimited? How do pragmatic solutions to questions about meaning fare vis-à-vis syntactic solutions? Is there a pattern emerging? and, relatedly, What are the future prospects for pragmatics PPL in theories of natural language meaning? I conclude with a discussion of the relation between pragmatics PPL and functionalism, observing that contextualism has to play a central role in functionalist pragmatics at the expense of minimalism and sententialism.

In this contribution, we offer an original analysis of the relation between control structures, de se readings and Immunity to Error through Misidentification. We propose that control structures are the result of an operation of Thematic Overwriting (TO), which conflates two thematic roles into one and delivers a logical representation whereby two properties are predicated of a unique argument. The account we propose explains a number of facts concerning control structures: (i) The fact that control structures are bound to the expression of de se attitudes; (ii) that fact that some control structures – more precisely, those control structures involving an Experiencer subject – are bound to the expression of implicit de se attitudes, that is, de se propositional attitudes that are immune to error through misidentification; (iii) the contrast between optional and non-optional control; (iv) the contrast between partial and exhaustive control. The account we propose also predicts a diachronic constraint on the emergence of control structures, whereby TO first emerges in the context of implicit de se attitudes and only later is extended to other de se contexts. This prediction is supported by the attested development of control structures from Old English (OE) through early Modern English (ENE) and Middle English (ME) to Modern English.

According to virtually all major theories of conditionals, conditionals with a true antecedent and a true consequent are true. Yet conditionals whose antecedent and consequent have nothing to do with each other—so-called missing-link conditionals—strike us as odd, regardless of the truth values of their constituent clauses. Most theorists attribute this apparent oddness to pragmatics, but on a recent proposal, it rather betokens a semantic defect. Research in experimental pragmatics suggests that people can be more or less sensitive to pragmatic cues and may be inclined to differing degrees to evaluate a true sentence carrying a false implicature as false. We report the results of an empirical study that investigated whether people’s sensitivity to false implicatures is associated with how they tend to evaluate missing-link conditionals with true clauses. These results shed light on the question of whether missing-link conditionals are best seen as pragmatically infelicitous or rather as semantically defective.

Expressions are synonymous if they have the same semantic content. Complex expressions are synonymously isomorphic in Alonzo Church’s sense if one is obtainable from the other by a sequence of alphabetic changes of bound variables or replacements of component expressions by syntactically simple synonyms. Synonymous isomorphism provides a very strict criterion for synonymy of sentences. Several eminent philosophers of language hold that synonymous isomorphism is not strict enough. These philosophers hold that ‘Greeks prefer Greeks’ and ‘Greeks prefer Hellenes’ express different propositions even if they are synonymously isomorphic. They hold that the very recurrence (multiple occurrence) of ‘Greeks’ contributes to the proposition expressed something that indicates the very recurrence in question. Kit Fine argues that this thesis, which he labels semantic relationism calls for a radically new conception of semantics. I have argued that the relevant phenomenon is wholly pragmatic, entirely non-semantic. Here I supplement the case with a new argument. No cognition without recognition—or almost none. With this observation, standard Millianism has sufficient resources to confront Frege’s puzzle and related problems without injecting pragmatic phenomena where they do not belong.

Peter Hanks and Scott Soames have developed a theory of propositions as structured cognitive event types, as have I in earlier works. They use the theory to offer similar accounts of transparent propositional relation reports, and very different accounts of opaque reports. For both, the sentences used to report propositional attitudes or speech acts are semantically unambiguous. Hanks invokes context-sensitivity, Soames pragmatics, to account for the different interpretations. I raise problems and offer solutions. Their accounts succumb to the non-compositionality of transparent reports, and wrongly predict that all propositional relation reports have both transparent and opaque interpretations. Soames’s pragmatic enrichment account of the opaque interpretation is unfounded, and forces him to conclude that competent speakers do not know what the sentences they use mean. The notion of an “object-dependent” or “bare” proposition is both problematic and unnecessary. I offer a new account, on which propositional relation reports have the semantic ambiguity characteristic of idioms, with the transparent interpretation being highly but not completely compositional.

I will argue that Frege’s puzzle arises only in taking into consideration the cognizer’s viewpoint. Although this sounds trivial, it triggers some important consequences. In particular, Frege’s puzzle has nothing to do with the notion of identity. For, the puzzle rests on whether the speaker/hearer (or writer/reader) conceives the names flanking the identity-sign to be co-referential or not (independently of whether they are de facto co-referential). I will show how Frege’s attempted solution in the Begriffsschrift can be rescued and how this may not conflict with the solution Frege proposes in introducing the sense/reference distinction. To do so, though, we should recognize that Frege worked with different (and somewhat conflicting) notions of content and that he assumed that only a single content expressed by an utterance should encompass all the information conveyed by a statement. In questioning this assumption Frege’s puzzle or a Frege-inspired puzzle can be addressed and understood from a different perspective.

This paper advances an approach to presupposition rooted in the concept of commitment, a dialectical notion weaker than truth and belief. It investigates ancient medieval dialectical theories and develops the insights thereof for analyzing how presuppositions are evaluated and why a proposition is presupposed. In particular, at a pragmatic level, presuppositions are reconstructed as the conclusions of implicit arguments from presumptive reasoning, grounded on presumptions of different type and nature. A false (or rather unaccepted) presupposition can be thus represented as the outcome of a conflict of presumptions – the ones used by the speaker and the ones commonly accepted or backed by evidence. From an interpretative perspective, this defaulted presumptive reasoning can be explained by comparing the available presumptions and repaired by replacing the weaker and unacceptable ones.