Pragmatic Particularism

Abstract

For the Intentionalist, utterance content is wholly determined by a speaker's meaning-intentions; the sentence uttered serves merely to facilitate the audience's recovering these intentions. We argue that Intentionalists ought to be Particularists, holding that the only "principles" of meaning recovery needed are those governing inferences to the best explanation; "principles" that are both defeasible and, in a sense to be elaborated, variable. We discuss some ways in which some theorists have erred in trying to tame the "wild west" of pragmatics and context-sensitivity -including recent work that makes essential appeal to the information structure of a discourse --and in so doing, offer a general recipe for defending the Particularist picture of utterance content and its recovery that we favor. expression types with certain types of acts of speaker meaning (allowing that this linking might be mediated by an internally represented grammar à la Chomsky).Whatever you might make of the problems and prospects for this grand reductionist project, it is important to appreciate that a Gricean account of pragmatics, developed by Grice, Loar, and Schiffer, remains plausible. This picture, which we will call Intentionalism, should be at least somewhat familiar to anyone who has kept up with recent work in the philosophy of language. Despite some disagreements on the details, all Intentionalists agree on the following:the content(s) of S's utterance of σ is what S meant in producing it; (ii) what S meant in producing σ is determined solely by their intentions and other propositional attitudes that are 'intrinsically specifiable in non-semantic terms' (Schiffer 2017, p. 68); and (iii) where the (intended) function of the sentence uttered is merely to help facilitate S's audience to recognize what they meant by it.According to the Intentionalist, linguistic communication is, by and large, a rational endeavor in which a speaker seeks to give her audience evidence that will, by their lights, put the audience in a position to recognize what they meant. This intentionally-provided evidence will typically include the standing, context-invariant meanings of the words she utters, in tandem with whatever specific facts about the context might be relevant. If things go well, this will allow the hearer to infer what the speaker meant.Utterance content is grounded in the speaker's intentions (and other relevant propositional attitudes); utterance interpretation is a matter of an inference aimed at the recovery of those intentions.Like others, we find this basic Intentionalist picture appealing. But by our lights, this picture of meaning and communication is not merely a plausible first pass at how best to think of pragmatics: we think that this picture is basically complete, in a sense to be elaborated. What the Intentionalist says about the (non) role of sentence meaning in the metaphysical determination of utterance content goes for every feature of the speaker's utterance other than the fact that the speaker produced it with the part...

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