Band 18, Heft 3 - Thematic Issue: Pragmatics and Philosophy (TIPP-3); Editor: Alessandro Capone

In this paper I will try to outline the reasons why, in order to understand the life and the nature of meaning, the semiotic tradition has always thought that it was better not to separate semantics and pragmatics. I will first reconstruct the history of this idea, grounded in Pragmatism and in Structural Linguistics. Later, I will deal with its first formulation in A Theory of Semiotics by Umberto Eco. In the second part of the paper, I will work on the idea by Ferdinand de Saussure that meanings are values, that is, indeterminate entities whose identity is determined only through reciprocal determination. I will claim that this idea is the importation in linguistics of Leibniz’s principles of the differential calculus. In the final part of the paper, I will apply this idea to the distinction between semantics and pragmatics, claiming that meanings are better understood through a theory of modes of existence. If we understand the differential nature of meaning, we can see that meanings live only through the using of the expressions and these variations contribute to offer stability within the transformations, without creating a stable object defined by its properties and endowed with an independent existence split from the relationships that define it.

It is usually maintained that a subject with manifestly contradictory beliefs is irrational. How can we account, then, for the intuitive rationality of dialetheists , who believe that some manifest contradictions are true? My paper aims to answer this question. Its ultimate goal is to determine a characterization of (or rather a constraint for) rational belief approvable by both the theorists of Dialetheism and its opponents. In order to achieve this goal, a two-step strategy will be adopted. First, a characterization of rational belief applicable to non-dialetheist believers will be determined; this characterization will involve the semantic apparatus of Nathan Salmon’s Millian Russellianism but will get rid of the problematic and obscure notion of mode of presentation ( guise in his own terminology), replacing it with a couple of novel devices, belief subsystems and cognitive coordination . Second, using ideas from Graham Priest, the leading proponent of Dialetheism, such a characterization will be modified, so as to devise a new one able to account for the intuitive rationality of both dialetheist and non-dialetheist believers.

Building on their well-known act theory of propositions, Soames and Hanks have proposed a theory of what it is for sentences to express propositions, thereby answering a central question about the foundations of semantics. The basic idea is that for a sentence to express a proposition in a language is for speakers of the language to use the sentence to perform the act that is the proposition. I argue that this general account of expression fails to explain how incorrect usage is possible, how what sentences express differs from what they implicate, how unused sentences can express propositions, how compositional meanings are possible, and how to specify who the speakers of L are without circularity. I go on to show how these things can be explained within the structured cognitive proposition framework.

In the experiment described in the paper Noah Goodman & Andreas Stuhlmüller. 2013. Knowledge and im-plicature: Modeling language understanding as social cognition. Topics in Cognitive Science 5(1). 173–184, empirical support was provided for the predictive power of the Rational Speech Act (RSA) model concerning the interpretation of utterances employing numerals in uncertainty contexts. The RSA predicts a Bayesian interdependence between beliefs about the probability distribution of the occurrence of an event prior to receiving information and the updated probability distribution after receiving information. In this paper we analyze whether the RSA is a descriptive or a normative model. We present the results of two analogous experiments carried out in Polish. The first experiment does not replicate the original empirical results. We find that this is due to different answers on the prior probability distribution. However, the model predicts the different results on the basis of different collected priors: Bayesian updating predicts human reasoning. By contrast, the second experiment, where the answers on the prior probability distribution are as predicted, is a replication of the original results. In light of these results we conclude that the RSA is a robust, descriptive model, however, the experimental assumptions pertaining to the experimental setting adopted by Goodman and Stuhlmüller are normative.

We intuitively make a distinction between lying and misleading . As several philosophers have pointed out, on the account of this distinction favored here – the adverbial account, as I’ll call it – it provides evidence on the theoretical notion of what is said and the related theoretical distinction between semantics and pragmatics. For, on that account, the distinction tracks whether or not the content and the assertoric force with which it is presented are semantically conveyed. On an alternative (assertoric) commitment account, the difference between lying and misleading is predicated instead on the strength of assertoric commitment. One lies when one presents with full assertoric commitment what one believes to be false; one merely misleads when one presents it with short-of-full assertoric commitment, by merely hinting or otherwise implying it. Here I’ll present the debate confronting the two accounts, and I’ll provide support for the adverbial account and its methodological application.

In this paper, I want to vindicate the contextualist treatment that is typically applied by artefactualists on fictional entities ( ficta ) both to general and to singular negative existentials. According to this treatment, the truth value of a negative existential, whether general or singular, changes according to whether the existential quantifier or the first-order existence predicate is contextually used as respectively ranging over and applying to a restricted or an unrestricted domain of beings. In (2003), Walton has criticized this treatment with respect to singular negative existentials in particular. First of all, however, as (Predelli, Stefano. 2002. ‘Holmes’ and Holmes. A Millian analysis of names from fiction. Dialectica 56. 261–279) has shown, this treatment can be applied to singular predications in general, independently of the existential case. Moreover, not only does applying it to singular negative existentials explain why we may contextually use the quantifier restrictedly in general negative existentials, but also it accounts for why comparative negative existentials, both singular and general, may have different truth values as well depending on the comparison group they mobilize.