A couple of questions on Relevance Theory.
1) What are the main points of distinction between RT and the Gricean
paradigm? If I were to guess, based on the slim reading I've done, I would
say:
a) It assumes that it is the enriched proposition (logical kernal +
pragmatics) that should be judged for truth value. This rectifies the
counterintuitive Gricean consequence that many if not most of our utterances
are strictly false.
b) appealing to notions like that of "expliciture", it claims that the
logical kernal of many utterances cannot be assigned a truth value until
various appeals to context have been made.
Is this even close?
2) Can a non-arbitrary pragmatics/semantics boundary be maintained? I
doubt that it can, and have been arguing as much with Speranza for years.
One of the"laws" that seems to get appealed to in the literature goes
something as follows: "Implicate as much as possible!" (I believe Levinson
puts it this way). In other words, natural language use leans heavily upon
inferences from linguistic meaning, rather than an explicit statement
(linguistic meaning) of each element the *speaker* meant. But to me this seems
entirely a matter of "energy conservation". Were we able to emit and absorb
communications at a much greater speed, there would be no need for this
rule. We could, by means of various notational devices., indicate
*explicitly* that a particular use of a definete description (to use my
favorite example) was referential rather than attributive-- "The King of
France (R)", perhaps. In this language what is now pragmatics would simply
get written out as part of the sense of the sentence. So a sentence like
1):
1) The King of France is not bald.
which can be uttered with the pragmatic implication that there exists a King
of France in place or not, becomes two sentences. Something like:
1a) The King of France is not bald, and there is a King of France.
or
1b) The King of France is not bald, because there is no King of France..
Semantics plus pragmatics becomes all semantics in a language where "energy
conservation" is not an issue. In 1) the same sense plus different
pragmatics becomes two different senses in 1a) and 1b) . Hence the pragmatics/semantics
boundary is arbitrary.
Cheers,
M.J.Murphy
The shapes of things are dumb.
-L. Wittgenstein
The shapes of things are dumb.
-L. Wittgenstein
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