Warner Pragmatics Semantics Grice Schiffer and Schiffer

Analytic Philosophy, 2017

Intercultural Pragmatics, 2018

Dominant accounts of 'speaker meaning' in post-Gricean contextualist pragmatics tend to focus on single utterances, making the theoretical assumption that the object of pragmatic analysis is restricted to cases where speakers and hearers agree on utterance meanings, leaving instances of misunderstandings out of their scope. However, we know that divergences in understandings between interlocutors do often arise, and that when they do, speakers can engage in a local process of meaning negotiation. In this paper, we take insights from interactional pragmatics to offer an empirically informed view on 'speaker meaning' that incorporates both speakers' and hearers' perspectives, alongside a formalisation of how to model speaker meanings in such a way that we can account for both understandings-the canonical cases-and misunderstandings, but critically, also the process of interactionally negotiating meanings between interlocutors. We thus highlight that utterance-level theories of meaning provide only a partial representation of speaker meaning as it is understood in interaction, and show that inferences about a given utterance at any given time are formally connected to prior and future inferences of all participants. Our proposed model thus provides a more fine-grained account of how speakers converge on 'speaker meanings' in real time, showing how such meanings are often subject to a joint endeavour of complex inferential work. The interactional achievement of speaker meaning: Towards a formal account of conversational inference "meaning lies not with the speaker nor the addressee nor the utterance alone as many philosophical arguments have considered, but rather with the interactional past, current, and projected next moment. The meaning of an entire utterance is a complex, not well understood, algorithm of these emergent, non-linear, sense-making interactions" (Schegloff et al. 1996: 181)

PsycEXTRA Dataset, 2000

Our main aim in this paper is to show that constructing an adequate theory of communication involves going beyond Grice's notion of speaker's meaning. After considering some of the difficulties raised by Grice's three-clause definition of speaker's meaning, we argue that the characterisation of ostensive communication introduced in relevance theory can provide a conceptually unified explanation of a much wider range of communicative acts than Grice was concerned with, including cases of both 'showing that' and 'telling that', and with both determinate and indeterminate import.

Intercultural Pragmatics, 2018

Dominant accounts of ‘speaker meaning’ in post-Gricean contextualist pragmatics tend to focus on single utterances, making the theoretical assumption that the object of pragmatic analysis is restricted to cases where speakers and hearers agree on utterance meanings, leaving instances of misunderstandings out of their scope. However, we know that divergences in understandings between interlocutors do often arise, and that when they do, speakers can engage in a local process of meaning negotiation. In this paper, we take insights from interactional pragmatics to offer an empirically informed view on ‘speaker meaning’ that incorporates both speakers’ and hearers’ perspectives, alongside a formalisation of how to model speaker meanings in such a way that we can account for both understandings – the canonical cases – and misunderstandings, but critically, also the process of interactionally negotiating meanings between interlocutors. We thus highlight that utterance-level theories of meaning provide only a partial representation of speaker meaning as it is understood in interaction, and show that inferences about a given utterance at any given time are formally connected to prior and future inferences of all participants. Our proposed model thus provides a more fine-grained account of how speakers converge on ‘speaker meanings’ in real time, showing how such meanings are often subject to a joint endeavour of complex inferential work.

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 2014

In a rare discussion of Gadamer’s work, Davidson takes issue with Gadamer’s claim that successful communication requires that interlocutors share a common language. While he is right to see an difference between his own views and Gadamer’s on this point, Davidson appears to have misunderstood what motivates Gadamer’s position, eliding it with that of his more familiar conventionalist interlocutors. This paper articulates Gadamer’s view of the role of language in communicative understanding as an alternative to both Davidson’s and that of the conventionalist writers Davidson critiques. It is argued, first, that Gadamer employs a conception of what individuates a language, and thus of what it means for two speakers to ‘share’ a language, that Davidson never considers. By emphasizing the role of ‘application’ in the historical development of languages, Gadamer develops a view in which languages are distinguished not by their particular semantic or syntactic rules, but by subtle differences between the concepts they express. Second, it is argued that the instances of ‘asymmetrical’ communication—communication between interlocutors who have different sets of concepts at their disposal—that motivate Gadamer’s position pose a challenge to Davidson’s account of interpretative charity.

Mind & Language, 2002

Within the philosophy of language, pragmatics has tended to be seen as an adjunct to, and a means of solving problems in, semantics. A cognitive-scientific conception of pragmatics as a mental processing system responsible for interpreting ostensive communicative stimuli (specifically, verbal utterances) has effected a transformation in the pragmatic issues pursued and the kinds of explanation offered. Taking this latter perspective, I compare two distinct proposals on the kinds of processes, and the architecture of the system(s), responsible for the recovery of speaker meaning (both explicitly and implicitly communicated meaning).

1997

Nous, 2002

2020

DOI: http://doi.org/10.26333/sts.xxxiv2.05 In this paper I argue that the notions of speaker’s reference and semantic reference—used by Kripke in order to counter the contentious consequences of Donnellan’s distinction between the referential use and the attributive use of definite descriptions—do not have any application in the interpretive interaction between speaker and hearer. Hearers are always concerned with speaker’s reference. Either, in cases of cooperation, as presented as such by the speaker or, in cases of conflict, as perceived as such by the hearer. Any claim as to semantic reference is irrelevant for the purposes of communication and conversation. To the extent that the purpose of semantic theory is to account for linguistic communication, there is no reason to take definite descriptions to have semantic reference.

Explicit Communication, 2010

Introduction: commitments and issues comprehension distinguishes it in some ways from the more philosophically-oriented concerns of contextualist semantics. 2 2. Explicature, what is said, conventional/encoded meaning and cancellability The point of departure for the relevance-theoretic concept of explicature is Grice's notion of 'what is said' (contrasted with 'what is implicated'). As he construed it, 'what is said' has the following two properties: (a) it is speaker-meant ('m-intended') content and (b) it is 'closely related to the conventional meaning of the words (the sentence) […] uttered' though grasping it might also require a hearer to choose between several senses and to identify indexical reference (Grice 1975: 44). It is widely recognised now that these two requirements pull in different directions and that it is not generally possible to sustain both in a single entity. 3 With regard to the property of being speaker-meant (and distinct from implicature), a number of theorists have converged in delineating a much more pragmatically rich level of utterance content, variously called 'explicature' (Sperber and Wilson 1986/95), intuitive or enriched 'what is said' (Recanati 2001), or 'impliciture' (Bach 1994), and one of the upshots of this has been that many cases of what Grice discussed as generalised conversational implicatures, as well as certain cases of non-literal (figurative) meaning, including hyperbole, metaphor and metonymy, are now quite widely thought to contribute to this level of directly communicated speaker meaning. At the same time, some theorists, in particular Kent Bach (1994), Laurence Horn (2006) and Manuel García-Carpintero (2007 and chapter 5 of this volume) have argued the case (on varying grounds) for a minimal 'semantic' notion of 'what is said' which answers to the second of Grice's requirements, that of close correlation with sentence-type meaning. Note that if this were found to be a viable notion, it would be additional to, not instead of, the conception of explicit content favoured by relevance-theorists and other contextualists (that is, explicature). This essentially follows from the fact that the minimalist 'what is said', unlike explicature, need not be, and frequently isn't, speaker-meant (in RT terms, it doesn't fall under the speaker's communicative intention), a point made with particular clarity and strong endorsement by Bach (1994: 143-4). A couple of examples should suffice here to demonstrate this minimalist notion of 'saying without meaning': (1) Mother (to child crying over a cut on his knee): You're not going to die. (example due to Bach 1994) (2) Jim: Would you like to stay for supper? Sue: I've eaten. In (1), what the mother means (m-intends, in Gricean terms) is that the child is not going to die from the cut on his knee but what she says (without m-intending it) is that he's not going to die tout court. In (2), what Sue means (the explicature of her utterance, in RT terms) is that she's eaten supper that evening, but what she says (on this minimalist semantic construal) is just that she's eaten (something, at some time). Furthermore, on the Bach/Horn minimalist construal, what is said need not be fully propositional: sentences such as 'He is ready', 'She is too tall', 'I've had enough', although syntactically complete, are generally thought to be semantically incomplete, so when a speaker utters one of these, the content of what she says, in the favoured