Pragmatics

This paper aims to unify two puzzles. One is the puzzle of Heim sequences: while many Sobel sequences can be felicitously uttered, their reverses, i.e. Heim sequences, often sound bad. The other puzzle is that true-true counterfactuals, i.e. counterfactuals with both true antecedents and true consequents, are invariably true on the standard Stalnaker-Lewis semantics, while some of them appear to be infelicitous to utter. True-true counterfactuals are first divided into two categories, which I call “unconnected” and “insufficient” true-trues. The two (...) kinds, I argue, deserve distinct pragmatic accounts. Then, it is argued that the category of insufficient true-trues is a special case of Heim sequences, in the sense that whatever is responsible for the infelicity of Heim sequences should also account for the infelicity of insufficient true-trues. Evidence for this unification is that the (in)felicity of both insufficient true-trues and Heim sequences reacts in similar ways to a series of contextual variations. Given the unification, I review two existing pragmatic accounts of Heim sequences—Moss in Nouˆs 46:561–586, 2012 and Ippolito in Ling & Phil 43:633–671, 2020—and try to apply them to insufficient true-trues. As will be clear, both accounts solve the insufficient true-true puzzles to the same degree of success as they solve the puzzle of Heim sequences, and neither account is completely satisfactory. In comparison, Ippolito’s account is more promising, and I provide a modification of it, which is expected to be an improved solution to both puzzles. (shrink)

Using the Hindi-Urdu discourse particle 'lo' as a case study, the present paper models mirativity within the Table model framework (Farkas & Roelofsen, 2017). This comes with an enrichment of the Table model; we propose the discourse structure to encode, in addition to discourse commitments, the time these commitments are publicized. We also incorporate a component that contains the public record of private beliefs. With these two additions, we seek to capture mirativity in the Table model, emphasizing recency as a (...) condition for surprise and underlining the need and the conceptual difficulty of incorporating private beliefs in a public scoreboard of conversation. We show that the difficulty can be overcome to fulfill the modeling need. (shrink)

Ludwig Wittgenstein famously asserted that a serious work of philosophy could be written composed of nothing but jokes. Taking Wittgenstein’s assertion seriously, we examine a range of philosophical accounts of verbal humor, specifically jokes and puns, dividing them according to whether they focus on the syntactic, semantic, or pragmatic elements of joking and punning acts. We then employ them to see if standard examples of philosophical discourse could thereby be seen as jokes themselves. Perhaps Wittgenstein was more correct than he (...) realized and we are already writing philosophy in terms of jokes. (shrink)

This companion glossary provides definitional, etymological, and contextual documentation for fifty-five vernacular and slang terms employed in Boether’s (2025) philosophical treatise “No Cap.” Entries are organized chronologically across five eras—the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, and the contemporary period (2020s to present)—and each entry supplies the term’s part of speech, approximate era of currency, a three-to-five sentence definition situating the term within its sociolinguistic context, and one to three authentic usage examples. The glossary is intended for scholars, readers, and interlocutors who (...) encountered the parent treatise and found its vernacular register a barrier to comprehension—thereby, as the treatise itself argues, experiencing its central thesis firsthand. This document demonstrates that the decipherment of slang requires sustained scholarly labor equivalent in kind, if not in prestige, to the mastery of any technical disciplinary vocabulary. (shrink)

Los veinte años que van desde fines de los setenta hasta fines de los noventa del siglo pasado, presenciaron la influencia del pensamiento de Donald Davidson en casi todas las áreas de la filosofía. Aunque el propio autor no se propuso construir un sistema, el proyecto que comenzó con algunas anotaciones técnicas en semántica formal y teoría de la acción fue ampliándose progresivamente para incorporar intuiciones en muchas otras áreas. Si bien los detalles técnicos del proyecto han recibido severos cuestionamientos, (...) muchas de esas intuiciones siguen siendo válidas. En este texto me propongo reseñar y discutir las tesis centrales del libro de Karina Pedace con el objetivo de evaluar esas intuiciones, más allá de si algunos de sus críticos se han concentrado en detalles que podrían ser poco relevantes para entender los objetivos principales del proyecto. (shrink)

La pregunta central en este artículo es si es posible sostener una teoría verificacionista del significado. La tesis es que solo es posible al interior de una teoría holista de la interpretación. El artículo comienza ubicando las proferencias verbales significativas al interior del contexto de las acciones intencionales, para después mostrar por qué las versiones clásicas del principio de verificación (Ayer) fracasan al suponer una semántica atomista. Se defiende luego una posición verificacionista y holista de la interpretación que pretende integrar (...) intuiciones acerca del significado, procedentes del segundo Wittgenstein, de la lectura davidsoniana de Tarski y de Heidegger. (shrink)

A speaker wishes to persuade a listener to take a certain action. The conditions under which the request is justified, from the listener’s point of view, depend on the state of the world, which is known only to the speaker. Each state is characterized by a set of statements from which the speaker chooses. A persuasion rule specifies which statements the listener finds persuasive. We study persuasion rules that maximize the probability that the listener accepts the request if and only (...) if it is justified, given that the speaker maximizes the probability that his request is accepted. We prove that there always exists a persuasion rule involving no randomization and that all optimal persuasion rules are ex-post optimal. We relate our analysis to the field of pragmatics. (shrink)

As a start, we give further examples of Alloy specifications. Next we turn to specification of imperative programs. Assertions about programs are specifications of how the program is supposed to behave. Assertions can be used for correctness reasoning and for testing. We illustrate the important notions of preconditions and postconditions. We demonstrate how the state transitions of imperative programming can be modelled as relations in Alloy. Correctness reasoning can be linked to testing and debugging by means of executable assertions, and (...) by means of random generation of test cases based on preconditions and postconditions. (shrink)

If ‘a’ and‘b’are (proper) names and if the meaning of a name is exhausted by its referent, how can‘a = a’differ in cognitive value from‘a = b’if‘a = b’is true? This is Frege's famous puzzle and Bezuidenhout reconstructs it using demonstrative NPs in place of names, i.e.: This X is that X.’Her solution is to posit the‘truth-conditional relevance’of the de re modes of presentation of such expressions. My major objection is that Bezuidenhout's examples are such that the NP to the (...) right of the copula is anaphoric rather than demonstrative and cannot, therefore, support her argument. (shrink)

Arguments are movements of thought. From a logical point of view, such a movement is justifiable as it tends to preserve or transmit truth. To speak of such tendency is to abstract from particular movements of thought and to ascent to the forms of such movements. Thus logical theory is said to concern rules of validity or cogency that one may use to evaluate forms of arguments, forms as may be instantiated by particular sets of statements which we may use (...) to represent particular movements of thought. (shrink)

Bruns lucidly depicts the distinctions and convergences between these two lines of thought by examining the works of Mallarme, Flaubert, Joyce, Beckett, and...

Grice’s notion of what is said has been challenged in many directions and, since then, there are a lot of new proposals to understand it. One of these new proposals claims that what a speaker said is not part of the speaker meaning. In that sense, the content said by uttering a sentence is not intentioned by the speaker but a purely semantic and syntactic matter. Kent Bach argues for this proposal and is the main exponent of it. My aim (...) will be to show that Bach’s arguments do not work. There are two different arguments in Bach (1994, 1999, 2001). The first, that I call the direct argument, gives us three reasons against the idea that what is said is meant by the speaker. My goal in the first section will be to show that these reasons are not conclusive. Bach’s notion of what is said should rest on the second argument, the indirect argument. In it, he argues that if what is said is not part of the communicative intentions of the speaker, then it is possible that the content said is not propositional. With this idea, Bach uses what he calls the IQ test.. (shrink)

This final part of the essay begins by exploring some linguistic resources that organize the overall structure of utterances and longer stretches of discourse. Then specific study of emission is broached: after touching upon some further constraints and patterns of interpersonal behavior, the previously developed general sketch of (actionlike) activities’ inception is applied to several types of speech (soliloquy, full other-addressed speech and an intermediate type); the section ends with an assessment of results. Study of linguistic reception is prefaced by (...) a general sketch of processes occurring in perception-like activities, which is then specified for Iinguistic reception; on this basis alternative preferential interpretations of an example are delved into. After an appraisal of results and perspectives and a section on general (mainly methodological) conclusions, the essay comes to a close with several Appendixes. (shrink)

When modelling complex systems one can not include all the causal factors, but one has to settle for partial models. This is alright if the factors left out are either so constant that they can be ignored or one is able to recognise the circumstances when they will be such that the partial model applies. The transference of knowledge from the point of application to the point of learning utilises a combination of recognition and inference ­ a simple model of (...) the important features is learnt and later situations where inferences can be drawn from the model are recognised. Context is an abstraction of the collection of background features that are later recognised. Different heuristics for recognition and model formulation will be effective for different learning tasks. Each of these will lead to a different type of context. Given this, there are (at least) two ways of modelling context: one can either attempt to investigate the contexts that arise out of the heuristics that a particular agent actually applies (the `internal' approach); or (if this is feasible) one can attempt to model context using the external source of regularity that the heuristics exploit. There are also two basic methodologies for the investigation of context: a top-down (or `foundationalist') approach where one tries to lay down general, a priori principles and a bottom-up (or `scientific') approach where one can try and find what sorts of context arise by experiment and simulation. A simulation is exhibited which is designed to illustrate the practicality of the bottom-up approach in elucidating the sorts of internal context that arise in an artificial agent which is attempting to learn simple models of a complex environment. It ends with a plea for the cooperation of the AI and Machine Learning communities as both learning and inference is needed if context is to make complete sense. (shrink)

Registrants for the academic study of philosophy, expecting an encounter with special cognitive products, regal truths, are soon enough disabused. Philosophy, its supposedly special access to the structure of things exploded, is relegated to sundry tasks of intellectual hygiene. I track down the source of the unrealistic view, anatomising what has a strong claim to be regarded as the regal enterprise’s inau¬gural reasoning—in Plato. When professionals consider the successor activity that is called ‘philosophy,’ they should therefore wonder about the label. (...) The deposition of she who was once known as Queen of the Sciences is, I argue, really the end of philosophy. Does the prevail¬ing professional attitude attest to mere nostalgia? In fact, the view of philo¬sophy as (say) conceptual enquiry inherits some of the fantasy. To the extent that continued use of the label is internally justified, that signals a deeper mistake on the part of the users about the truth. (shrink)

Once assessments and continuers are focussed on as distinguishable phenomena it becomes clear that they differ from each other not just in the details of their sequential placement within an extended turn, but in other significant ways as well.First, though assessments can take the form of talk with clear lexical content (for example `Oh wow' and assessment adjectives such as ‘beautiful’), they can also be done with sounds such as ‘Ah:::’ whose main function seems to be the carrying of an (...) appropriate intonation contour, as well as gesturally (cf. M. Goodwin, 1980). In this they resemble continuers, which can be performed both with talk whose lexical status is not always granted, and with appropriate gestures such as nods. In view of the way in which both continuers and brief assessments are characteristically situated within a rather specialized environment, the ongoing talk of another, it is not surprising that they share these characteristics. Indeed in so far as these features provide minimal lexical and auditory interference with the other talk already in progress, they are precisely some of the adaptations that would be expected of action able to function in such an environment. Given such structural similarity in action that is also quite brief, the clarity with which assessments can be distinguished from continuers becomes interesting. If in fact these objects are doing different work in the same environment, the salience of their distinctness from each other becomes an important feature of the structure of each. In view of the economy and clarity that brief assessments require, it is all the more remarkable that many of them, through the details of the way in which they are pronounced and their intonation contour, are able to convey quite detailed, even intricate, information about their speaker's involvement in both the assessment and the talk of the moment.Second, while ‘uh huh’ seems to be restricted to placement in the midst of extended talk by another, assessments can occur at the completion of such extended turns as well. Indeed assessments are one of the prototypical ways of bringing an extended turn such as a story to completion. Such differential placement is quite compatible with what has already been noted about the organization of these phenomena. For example, insofar as a continuer treats the talk just heard as preliminary to further talk it would be quite inappropriate as a technique for marking completion of an extended turn. On the other hand by virtue of the way in which they appreciate the details of what has just been said without marking that talk as a prelude to something else, assessments are apt structures for doing terminal work on an extended sequence.Third, ‘uh huh’ seems to be an exclusively recipient action — indeed its work as a continuer is accomplished precisely through placement relative to more extended talk by another speaker. Assessments, however, can be done by speaker as well as recipient.Fourth, though analysis in the present paper has focussed on brief assessments (the type of assessment most similar in form to continuers), assessments unlike continuers can in fact take many shapes, some of them quite elaborate with, for example, extended sentences and even sequences of turns being devoted exclusively to the activity of doing an assessment.In sum, alternative types of action are available to recipients for constructing responses in the midst of another's extended talk. Though the responses themselves are typically brief, the presence of alternatives that can be placed in a variety of sequential positions provides recipients with resources that enable them to participate in speaker's emerging talk in a differentiated fashion, something which has consequences for speaker's actions as well. (shrink)

The present essay explores conversation as a phenomenon of mutual turning . The act of turning reveals a basic tension between two approaches – that which puts the unmediated turn as the basis of dialogue , and the present approach that regards speech and the creative text as part and parcel of the conversational turn. The controversy is brought to the point of “break” which is both theoretical and refering to actual gaps of silence that occur at the midst of (...) conversation. Three such gaps or critical silences are explored – silence about, silence between and silence within. From these a general notion of break is discussed in a negative sense of a conversational crisis and in a positive sense of a creative breakthrough. (shrink)

THE PAPER ATTEMPTS TO RESCUE LEWIS'S DOCTRINE OF\nEXPRESSIVE LANGUAGE FROM THE SLOUGH INTO WHICH IT HAS\nLATELY BEEN FLUNG. THE PAPER DOES FOUR THINGS: PART I\nRECALLS LEWIS'S DOCTRINE OF EXPRESSIVE STATEMENTS\n('EXPRESSIVES'); PART II STATES THE VARIOUS CRITICISMS THAT\nHAVE BEEN SENT AGAINST THEM TOGETHER WITH CRITICISMS OF\nLEWIS'S CLAIMS THAT EXPRESSIVES WERE BOTH EMPIRICAL AND\nCERTAIN AND THAT THEY COULD SERVE AS ATOMS FOR HIS\nMOLECULAR 'TERMINATING JUDGMENTS', PART III DEMONSTRATES\nTHAT LEWIS'S EXPRESSIVES ARE REALLY SIMILES, SHARING ALL\nTHE PROPERTIES ATTRIBUTED TO SIMILES INCLUDING BEING\nCERTAIN, IN A (...) SIMILETIC WAY, AS WELL AS BEING EMPIRICAL;\nPART IV SHOWS THAT THE CRITICISMS STATED IN PART II SEEM TO\nREST ON A MISUNDERSTANDING OF EXPRESSIVES AND EXPRESSIVE\nLANGUAGE BUT THAT THEY CAN ALL BE MET BY EMPLOYING THE\nLANGUAGE MODEL OF SIMILE DEMONSTRATED IN PART III. (shrink)

This paper examines an aspect of the grammar-interaction interface with respect to how participants orient to intra-turn phrasal unit boundaries as a locus that has interactional import for turn and sequence organization in Korean conversation. Phrasal unit boundaries in Korean serve as a space within a turn in which the speaker of the turn in-progress invites the recipient to acknowledge the speaker's point expressed up-to-that-point and collaboratively display his/her understanding thereof. In a sequentially and topically 'ripe' context, such unit boundaries (...) often constitute places where more active participation on the part of the recipient is invited in the form of collaborative completion in which the recipient co-constructs the primary speaker's on-going turn. Phrasal unit boundaries also provide interactional resources which the speaker may exploit to sequentially delete out a problem in talk, e.g., by a sort of tying operation in which a subsequently added phrasal unit ties back to the speaker's previous utterance to the effect that the intervening talk containing a problem is canceled out by way of being shown to have been an interruption of the speaker's turn in-progress. This practice points to an aspect of the way in which the 'agglutinative' grammatical process involving the use of phrasal units shapes interactional patterns as observed in the course of organizing turns/sequences and managing problems in talk. (shrink)

While language is presumably unique to humans, there are possible pre-linguistic features that developed in the course of human evolution which predate features of language, and might have even been essential for its evolution. A number of such possible preadaptations for human language have been discussed, like the permanent lowering of the larynx, the ability to control one’s breath, or the inclination of humans to imitate. In this paper I would like to point out another candidate for a preadaptation, namely (...) the functional differentiation of the hands and the way in which they cooperate in manual actions. (shrink)

Transcendental pragmatics is the attempt to make Kants transcendental philosophy philosophically defensible by means of a reconstruction in terms of semiotics and the theory of communication. The central theses of transcendental pragmatics are: philosophical final justification is possible. The claim of radical fallibilism: "all propositions are fallible, therefore final justification is impossible" is false. Both theses are defended against H. Keuths critique, recently published in this journal. Radical fallibilism, which admits the application of the principle of fallibility to itself entangles (...) itself pecisely for this reason in a whole raw of contradictions. Keuths objections rest upon a misunderstanding. His critique does not demonstrate the invalidity of reflexive final justification arguments because he misses the essential feature of such arguments namely that they are intended as strictly reflexive arguments. (shrink)

Chapter One: Introduction /. Why Study Philosophy of Language? Why should philosophers (or human beings in their leisurely reflective moments) be interested ...