Verbalism and metalinguistic negotiation in ontological disputes

Metaphysical Disputes and Metalinguistic Negotiation

“…So the fan of verbal disputes can get around the second problem—and hold that the disputants may be charitably interpreted as using key terms differently in ways that lead them to literally express compatible propositions, without giving up the idea that they may be involved in a genuine dispute at the level of pragmatics. As Delia Belleri puts it, the metalinguistic negotiation account may provide the “best way of explaining the persisting intuition of disagreement in the face of the presence of a verbal dispute” (Forthcoming, 9 in draft). For there may be a genuine dispute even if it is not at the level of literal expression of conflicting semantic contents.…”

How to have a metalinguistic dispute

“…I now argue that neither Belleri's propositional account nor Thomasson's nonpropositional one meets the adequacy conditions. Belleri (2017Belleri ( , p. 2215) holds that 'the pragmatic inference that would allow each participant to go from the verbal, object-level disagreement to the implicitly communicated metalinguistic disagreement [...] could involve charity as well as broadly construed Gricean considerations as to what best explains the assumed cooperativeness of the speaker'. She further clarifies that her preferred account treats metalinguistic negotiations as 'conversationally implicating normative claims as to which linguistic options should be favoured' (fn.…”

“…11) ‘aim to demonstrate that the metalinguistic analysis [...] is consistent with, and indeed highly plausible on, entirely mainstream views of linguistic communication’, I am exclusively interested in adequate accounts that are situated within a ‘mainstream’ linguistic theory, by which I mean a theory that takes a significant proportion of ordinary conversations to be devoid of metalinguistic negotiation. 4 To my knowledge, the only attempts in the literature to situate an account within a ‘mainstream’ theory of communication occur in Belleri 2017 and Thomasson 2017 . I now argue that neither Belleri’s propositional account nor Thomasson’s non-propositional one meets the adequacy conditions.…”

“…Those who have discussed metalinguistic negotiation consider it to be a pervasive feature of philosophical and ordinary discourse, including discussions about aesthetics (Sundell 2011), metaphysics (Thomasson 2015(Thomasson , 2017Belleri 2017), law (Plunkett and Sundell 2014), ethics (Plunkett and Sundell 2013;Plunkett 2015;Rast 2017), and other everyday topics. Yet the literature lacks a detailed analysis of metalinguistic negotiation situated within a 'mainstream' theory of communication.…”

(Mere) Verbalness and Substantivity Revisited

“…In particular, they can still have a metalinguistic dispute about which of their two divergent uses of language is best. See e.g Belleri (2017). on this.…”