Overlooking Conventions - The Trouble With Linguistic Pragmatism (Hardcover, 1st ed. 2021)

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.

General

Imprint:	Springer Nature Switzerland AG
Country of origin:	Switzerland
Series:	Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, 29
Release date:	October 2021
First published:	2021
Authors:	Michael Devitt
Dimensions:	235 x 155mm (L x W)
Format:	Hardcover
Pages:	326
Edition:	1st ed. 2021
ISBN-13:	978-3-03-070652-4
Categories:	Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Philosophy of language Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Semantics (meaning) > Pragmatics
LSN:	3-03-070652-4
Barcode:	9783030706524

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