Overview
- Criticizes the reliance on intuitions in theorizing about language
- Proposes a scientifically sound methodology for the semantics/pragmatics dispute
- Identifies the common confusion of what constitutes what is said, meant, etc., with the epistemological issue of how we tell what a speaker said, meant, etc
Part of the book series: Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology (PEPRPHPS, volume 29)
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Table of contents (12 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
Keywords
About this book
This book criticizes the methodology of the recent semantics-pragmatics debate in the theory of language and proposes an alternative. It applies this methodology to argue for a traditional view against a group of “contextualists” and “pragmatists”, including Sperber and Wilson, Bach, Carston, Recanati, Neale, and many others. The author disagrees with these theorists who hold that the meaning of the sentence in an utterance never, or hardly ever, yields its literal truth-conditional content, even after disambiguation and reference fixing; it needs to be pragmatically supplemented in context.
The standard methodology of this debate is to consult intuitions. The book argues that theories should be tested against linguistic usage. Theoretical distinctions, however intuitive, need to be scientifically motivated. Also we should not be guided by Grice’s “Modified Occam’s Razor”, Ruhl’s “Monosemantic Bias”, or other such strategies for “meaning denialism”. From this novel perspective, the striking examples of context relativity that motivate contextualists and pragmatists typically exemplify semantic rather than pragmatic properties. In particular, polysemous phenomena should typically be treated as semantic ambiguity. The author argues that conventions have been overlooked, that there’s no extensive “semantic underdetermination” and that the new theoretical framework of “truth-conditional pragmatics” is a mistake.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Michael Devitt is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of CUNY. He is the author of the following books: Designation (1981); Realism and Truth (1984/1991/1997); Language and Reality (with Kim Sterelny, 1987/1999); Coming to Our Senses (1996); Ignorance of Language (2006); Putting Metaphysics First (2010); Biological Essentialism (forthcoming). He has co-edited (with Richard Hanley) The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Language (2006)
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Overlooking Conventions
Book Subtitle: The Trouble With Linguistic Pragmatism
Authors: Michael Devitt
Series Title: Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70653-1
Publisher: Springer Cham
eBook Packages: Religion and Philosophy, Philosophy and Religion (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-70652-4Published: 09 October 2021
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-70655-5Published: 09 October 2022
eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-70653-1Published: 08 October 2021
Series ISSN: 2214-3807
Series E-ISSN: 2214-3815
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 326
Number of Illustrations: 1 b/w illustrations
Topics: Philosophy of Language, Pragmatics, Linguistics, general