What’s Wrong with Linguistic Contextualism? Michael Devitt The paper argues that writings of linguistic contextualists (including Sperber and Wilson, Carston, Recanati) embody three important mistakes: 1. The confusion of the metaphysics of meaning, focused on the speaker and concerned with what constitutes what is said, meant, etc., with the epistemology of interpretation, focussed on the hearer and concerned with how we tell what a speaker said, meant, etc.. 2.The acceptance of “Modified Occam’s Razor,” understood as advising against the positing of a new sense wherever the message can be derived by a pragmatic inference. 3.The urging of “Truth-Conditional Pragmatics” according to which the meaning of the sentence in an utterance does not alone yield a truth-conditional content (even after disambiguation and reference fixing); it needs to be pragmatically supplemented and can be so in indefinitely many ways yielding indefinitely many truth conditions.
Friday 25th March W6A Rm 708 1.30-3.30 _______________________________________________ SydPhil mailing list: http://sydphil.info 971 subscribers now served. To UNSUBSCRIBE, change your MEMBERSHIP OPTIONS, find ANSWERS TO COMMON PROBLEMS, or visit our ONLINE ARCHIVES, please go to the LIST INFORMATION PAGE: http://sydphil.info
