Cervelli, Persone e Società ***ABSTRACTS
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Brains, Persons, and Society *** ABSTRACTS Cervelli, Persone e Società ***ABSTRACTS |
Mikhail Kissine
Laboratoire de Linguistique Textuelle et de Pragmatique Cognitive
Université Libre de Bruxelles
Partisans
of semantic minimalism contend that the content of sentence tokens is
exhausted
by the semantic interpretation of their linguistic meaning. However,
the
existence of lexically encoded indexicals and demonstratives compels
the
advocates of such a view to posit a minimal, semantic conception of
context,
which is inherited mainly from Kaplan. Thus conceived, the context is
constituted by a fixed and small set of parameters that suffice to map
the
linguistic meaning onto content, and so abstracting from the ‘wide’ or
pragmatic context constituted by the details of the actual occasion of
utterance. However, Kaplan’s reluctance to include speaker’s intentions
within
the context has for unpleasant consequence that the character of a
demonstrative is not its linguistic meaning: what determines the
content of a
demonstrative in a context is the demonstratum. The directing
intentions come
into play before, at the preformal level in associating a distinct
syntactic
counterpart for each occurrence of the demonstrative (Kaplan 1989:
587-588).
Therefore, as Recanati (2000b: 298) points out: (a) character may not
be equated
with linguistic meaning, (b) the determination of Kaplanian contexts
depends on
the wide, pragmatic contexts. The main reason advanced for Kaplan in
defence of
his non-pragmatic conception of context is his desire to preserve the
validity
of inferences whose premises contain indexicals, such as
P1:
If John is here now, then Mary is happy.
P2:
John is here now.
C:
Mary is happy
This
argument presupposes that the validity of material inferences is
warranted by
the underlying logical structure. Any materiel inference like ‘It
rains,
therefore the street are wet’ should thus require an implicit
conditional
premise, and the (implicit) mastery of the rule of detachment (Brandom
1994:
97-102). However, if one apprehends the things the other way around,
and assumes,
as does Brandom, that logical vocabulary simply makes explicit the
inferential
role of materiel inferences, Kaplan’s argument is bereft if its
strength. It
makes sense to argue here and now in P1 and P2 are
assigned
content with respect to assumptions about speaker’s intentions–whether
or not
the conjunction of P1 and P2 was intended to yield C as a valid
conclusion. In
other words, wide, pragmatic context, which includes extra-linguistic
information such as speaker’s intentions, provides cues as whether two
utterances should combine into a material inference, and consequently,
whether
the indexicals or, for that matter, demonstratives should be assigned
the same
content. If so, there is no conceptual necessity for the intermediate
level of
semantic content. This is particularly plausible in the view of high
proportion
of uses of here and now that are not amenable to a
classical
Kaplanian analysis (Recanati 2000a). Since the commitment to semantic
context
is unavoidable for any semantic minimalist, independent justification
of such
an extra level is required.
References
Brandom,
R. B. (1994). Making It Explicit. Reasoning, Representing, and
Discursive
Commitment.
Kaplan,
D. (1989). "Afterthoughts." Themes from Kaplan. J. Amog, J. Perry and
H. K. Wettstein,
(eds.),
Recanati,
F. (2000a). "Are Here and Now Indexicals?" Texte(27-28): 115-127
Recanati,
F. (2000b). Oratio Obliqua, Oratio Recta. An Essay on
Metarepresentation. Cambridge,
Mass., MIT Press.