Topic: HUMAN SEMANTICS
Zero Tolerance for Pragmatics
By Christopher Gauker
The proposition expressed by a sentence is relative to a context. But what are the values of the context variables? Many theorists would include among these values aspects of the speaker's intention in speaking. My thesis is that, on the contrary, the values of the context variables never include the speaker's intention. My argument for this thesis turns on a consideration of the role that the concept of proposition expressed in context is supposed to play in a theory of linguistic communication and on a consideration of what a speaker and a hearer can reasonably expect of one another. Although I call this thesis zero tolerance for pragmatics, it is not an expression of intolerance for everything that might be called pragmatics.
Source: Online Papers in Philosophy
Posted by Tony Marmo
at 07:48 BST
Updated: Thursday, 16 June 2005 07:59 BST
