Normative Language in Context

Abstract

This chapter develops a contextualist account of normative language, focusing on broadly normative readings of modal verbs. The account draws on a more general framework for implementing a contextualist semantics and pragmatics, Discourse Contextualism. The aim of Discourse Contextualism is to derive the discourse properties of normative language from a contextualist interpretation of an independently motivated formal semantics, along with principles of interpretation and conversation. In using normative language, interlocutors can exploit their grammatical and world knowledge, and general pragmatic reasoning skills, to manage an evolving system of norms. Discourse Contextualism provides a perspicuous framework for further philosophical theorizing about the nature of normativity, normative language, and normative judgment. Delineating these issues can help refine our understanding of the space of overall theories and motivate more fruitful ways the dialectics may proceed. Discourse Contextualism provides a linguistic basis for a more comprehensive theory of normativity and normative discourse and practice.

Shifty Contextualism About Epistemics

“…Our Eavesdropping Evelyn could intelligibly react by saying that Ian is wrong, that 27. And he intends this claim to dissolve arguments from disagreement, as it clearer in other work, like Silk (2016) and Silk (2017b). the keys can't be there.…”

Expectation Biases and Context Management with Negative Polar Questions

“…One approach would be to treat VERUM as lexically flavor-neutral, as reflected in (ii), though perhaps receiving epistemic readings by default. On this line, using VERUM in (i) would directly express an intention to update the norms accepted for purposes of conversation (Portner [45], Silk [65,67]) to a value that implies p.…”

“…I suggest that we treat the operator introduced with preposed negation as having an ordinary semantics of epistemic necessity, though lexically associated with a general kind of endorsing use observed with modal expressions. The expressive and context-managing roles of NPQs are explained in terms of an independently attested kind of discourse-oriented use of context-sensitive language (Silk [63,65,67]). I show how NPQs' distinctive expectation biases and discourse properties can be derived using two additional independently motivated pieces of apparatus: first, a distinction between a possibility's being compatible with a body of information and its being live; second, a general principle of discourse relevance, generalized from previous literature.…”

Contextualism, Moral Disagreement, and Proposition Clouds

“…31 Consider 31 For a similar objection, see Finlay (2017: 194). One strategy to respond to this concern is to limit the scope of the disagreements to which the account is supposed to apply (see Silk (2017) and Khoo and Knobe (2016: 3)). Yet, this entails that my proposal should be preferred on the grounds of simplicity.…”