In this provocative book, Barwise and Perry tackle the slippery subject of \"meaning, \" a subject that has long vexed linguists, language philosophers, and logicians.

/pdf/situations-and-attitudes-57f065zg2d.pdf

Situations and Attitudes.

The central problem for pragmatics is that sentence meaning vastly underdetermines speaker's meaning. The goal of pragmatics is to explain how the gap between sentence meaning and speaker's meaning is bridged. This paper defends the broadly Gricean view that pragmatic interpretation is ultimately an exercise in mind-reading, involving the inferential attribution of intentions. We argue, however, that the interpretation process does not simply consist in applying general mind-reading abilities to a particular (communicative) domain. Rather, it involves a dedicated comprehension module, with its own special principles and mechanisms. We show how such a metacommunicative module might have evolved, and what principles and mechanisms it might contain.

/pdf/pragmatics-modularity-and-mind-reading-3uxu03ml7y.pdf

Pragmatics, Modularity and Mind-reading

© Deirdre Wilson and Dan Sperber 2012 Introduction Pragmatic studies of verbal communication start from the assumption (first defended in detail by the philosopher Paul Grice) that an essential feature of most human communication, both verbal and non-verbal, is the expression and recognition of intentions (Grice 1957, 1969, 1982, 1989) On this approach, pragmatic interpretation is ultimately an exercise in metapsychology, in which the hearer infers the speaker’s intended meaning from evidence she has provided for this purpose An utterance is, of course, a linguistically coded piece of evidence, so that verbal comprehension involves an element of decoding However, the decoded linguistic meaning is merely the starting point for an inferential process that results in the attribution of a speaker’s meaning The central problem for pragmatics is that the linguistic meaning recovered by decoding vastly underdetermines the speaker’s meaning There may be ambiguities and referential ambivalences to resolve, ellipses to interpret, and other indeterminacies of explicit content to deal with There may be implicatures to identify, illocutionary indeterminacies to resolve, metaphors and ironies to interpret All this requires an appropriate set of contextual assumptions, which the hearer must also supply To illustrate, consider the examples in (1) and (2):

Pragmatics, modularity and mindreading

From Discourse to Logic

We argue that attitude operators can manipulate the context of evaluation of some indexicals, and should thus be essentially treated as Kaplanian monsters The analysis is developed in an extensional system with individual, time, world and context variables A unified theory of unshiftable, shiftable and obligatorily shifted indexicals is offered, which accounts for a number of cross-linguistic facts in the domain of person, tense and mood

https://jeannicod.ccsd.cnrs.fr/ijn_00000289/document

A Plea for Monsters

Recorded messages and written notes are a source of befuddlement for the philosopher of language interested in the semantic behaviour of indexical expressions. It is a consequence of certain prima facie harmless premisses that sentences such as 'I am here now' may never be uttered falsely. But this conclusion is at odds with apparently true instances of 'I am not here now', written on a piece of paper or recorded in an answering machine. Assuming that our intuitions on the truth-values of recorded messages are to be trusted, it must be the case that some of the traditional assumptions in the semantics of indexicals ought to be rejected. So, where exactly did the traditional account of 'I', 'here', and 'now' go wrong, and what adjustments are required?

I am not here now

Introduction 1. Systems and their Inputs 2. Systems and Indexes 3. The Vagaries of Action 4. The Colour of the Leaves 5. The Easy Problem of Belief Reports Conclusion

Contexts: Meaning, Truth, and the Use of Language

I argue that some utterances of sentences containing occurrences of indexical expressions should not be evaluated with respect to the context of utterance. I suggest that we distinguish between context of utterance and context of interpret-ation, and I employ this distinction in the analysis of recorded messages and other interesting linguistic phenomena. I then discuss the implications of my views on contexts with respect to the logic of indexicals. Against the traditional view, I argue that



sentences such as ‘I am here now’ or ‘something exists’ should not be treated as logical truths.

https://eecoppock.info/Pragmatics/Papers/predelli-98.pdf

Utterance, Interpretation and the Logic of Indexicals

The main aim of this paper is that of providing a unified analysis for some interesting uses of quotation marks, including so-called scare quotes. The phenomena exemplified by the cases I discuss have remained relatively unexplored, notwithstanding a growing interest in the behavior of quotation marks. They are, however, of no lesser interest than other, more widely studied effectsachieved with the help of quotationmarks. In particular, as I argue in whatfollows, scare quotes and other similar instances bear interesting relations with someimportant themes in the study of natural languages, such as questions regarding alleged devicesof conventional implicature, cases of so-called metalinguistic negation, and, moregenerally, problems pertaining to the distinction between semantic and pragmatic fieldsof inquiry.

Scare Quotes and Their Relation to Other Semantic Issues

PART ONE 1. Preliminaries 2. The Vagaries of Use, Part One 3. The Vagaries of Use, Part Two PART TWO 4. An Introduction to Non Truth-Conditional Meaning 5. Register and Other Non Truth-Conditional Phenomena 6. Derogatory Slurs 7. Towards a Logic for 'Alas' PART THREE 8. Vocatives: Obstinacy and Recruitment 9. Semaphores and Giorgione 10. Davidsonian Quotation 11. Demonstratives and Demonstrations 12. Obstinacy and Reflexivity References Index

/pdf/meaning-without-truth-4c582eouoo.pdf

Stefano Predelli

Papers

I am not here now

Contexts: Meaning, Truth, and the Use of Language

Utterance, Interpretation and the Logic of Indexicals

Scare Quotes and Their Relation to Other Semantic Issues

Meaning without Truth