Volume 16, Issue 3 - Thematic Issue: Pragmatics and Philosophy (TIPP-2), Editor: Alessandro Capone

Classical rhetoricians dating back to Aristotle sought to define the principles of natural order that determine priority in sequences, especially in linguistic representations. Among the principles with the widest predictive power for the ancients and their modern heirs are those stating that A can be prior to B “with respect to temporal order”, that A can be prior to B with respect to what is “known or less informative” than what comes later, and that A can be prior to B with respect to what is “better” or “more worthy”. But when and how do these ordering principles influence the form of linguistic sequences, and how are conflicts between the principles resolved? What determines the priority between the principles of priority? What makes “natural order” natural? Drawing on over two millennia of scholarship, we explore the pragmatic motivation for the primary ordering principles, and in particular for those affecting the order of logically symmetric but rhetorically asymmetric conjunctions.

“Pragmatics involves perception augmented by some species of ‘ampliative‘ inference—induction, inference to the best explanation, Bayesian reasoning, or perhaps some special application of general principles special to communication, as conceived by Grice … —but in any case a sort of reasoning” (Korta, Kepa & John Perry. 2015. Pragmatics. In The stanford encyclopedia of philosophy Edward N. Zalta (ed.), Metaphysics research lab , Stanford, CA: Stanford University:1). Pragmatics assumes that one’s competence as speaker is sufficient to allow one to construct, in range of significant cases, plausible accounts of how speakers and audiences reason. The question is that are those who attribute reasoning to speakers and audiences suffering a “curious mental derangement” that prevents them from seeing that reasoning is rare? I consider four responses. (1) Speakers and audiences do reason to the extent pragmatic explanations require; they just typically do not do so consciously. (2) The second reply concedes that speakers and audiences often do not reason even unconsciously in any relevant detail, but it insists that attributions of reasoning can nonetheless be, and often are, explanatory. (3) The third reply is a response to objections to the second. It identifies reasoning with information processing steps. (4) The fourth view is that a speaker’s utterance provides an audience evidence for what the speaker means, but the audience typically does not reason to a conclusion about what the speaker means. I reject the first three replies and embrace the fourth, but I argue that attributions of reasoning in pragmatics can still play a significant explanatory role.

By literal meaning (LM) we usually refer to a theoretical notion which is at the center of a big debate involving philosophers and linguists with various orientations. At the same time, LM is rooted in a linguistic intuition of the speaker, which we could formulate as follows: words taken in isolation have a meaning. Adopting this general take on LM, we are using a notion of LM that seems incompatible with any research program of a contextualist type; I will show, instead, that in a radically contextualist (and Wittgensteinian) perspective, this notion of LM can have legitimate circulation in particular types of language games. I will propose a recovery of the notion of LM saving the speaker’s intuition showing that this notion can have heuristic power but only in those particular language games in which it is necessary to recover the meaning of words considered in isolation. To put it differently, I will maintain that the LM of a linguistic expression can be considered as a metalinguistic resource available to the speaker making use of it in various cases, for example when the conversational exchange that characterizes communication breaks down.

Capone and Bucca argue that legal interpretation can go significantly wrong when founded upon a false conception of language and linguistic practices. This claim is correct. Specifically, semantic-based theories of linguistic meaning that are based upon the idea that a “core” semantic meaning can be identified outside of context and then needs to be “pragmatically enriched” for specific applications get the project of understanding language use in the legal context profoundly backwards. This paper emphasizes the primacy of an embedded pragmatics over other conceptions of linguistic meaning and practice in law. Herman Oliphant, in “A Return to Stare Decisis” offers an argument that helps strengthen the claim for the “primacy of pragmatics” in law. His work also shows that if the primacy of pragmatics is accepted, not only does this have significant impact upon actual legal practice, but it also highlights worrisome blind spots in currently dominant philosophical theories of law. His argument is that a conception of law that is centered upon such an appeal to principle, stare dictis , leads to a legal practice based upon distorting abstractions and a false conception of language use in law pulled out of its worldly roots. Because of this, he argues that stare dictis is detrimental to a living and empirically effective and informed legal system. Hence the need for a return of stare decisis properly understood. His article gives some grounds for critiquing many dominant philosophical theories of law. Oliphant’s theory is, importantly, compatible with, and supported by, a picture of language use offered by Jaszczolt and recent work in neuropragmatism. This, in turn, can be thought as further verification of Capone and Buccas’ assertion that the adoption of a false theory of language can have far ranging and detrimental effects upon legal practice and legal theory.

In this work we consider Italian special questions expressing surprise and question-exclamatives expressing surprise-disapproval. Both sentence types are introduced by the adversative particle ma . In order to better understand the role of prosody and gesture in these structures with respect to syntax, we run some experiments of sentence production and sentence elicitation. The results point to an integrated model of the three components: syntax prosody and gestures. We will show in fact that the appropriate prosody and gesture are triggered by a dedicated projection in the syntactic structure, which is read off at the interface with the sensorimotor component.