Alessandro Capone

This book shows how pragmatics and philosophy are interconnected, and explores the consequences and ramifications of this innovative idea, especially in addressing and solving the problem of breaking Grice's circle. The author applies philosophy in order to get to a better understanding of pragmatics, and pragmatics in order to get a better understanding of philosophy. The book starts with a chapter on the non-cancellability of explicatures and the role that this idea plays in the resolution of Grice’s circle, and proceeds with the discussion of other topics in which explicatures or cancellability play an important and decisive role. While the reader proceeds in the reading of this book, they accumulate notions and pieces of knowledge which will be of invaluable use when arriving at the chapter on conversational presuppositions, where the author expresses his most radical views: namely that presuppositions are indeed cancellable, contrary to what many believe.

In this paper, I discuss expressions such as ‘Dad’, ‘Mum’, ‘Grandpa’, etc., which are called ‘quasi-proper names’. These expressions can be used both to refer to a thing or person in an assertion in which a predicate is assigned to the referent expressed by the quasi-proper-name and to call somebody in particular (John!). In so far as they are indexical expressions, they are even more directly referential than proper names and guarantee discourse continuity to a greater extent than proper names (even if this appears to some to be controversial). To understand the working of quasi-proper names, I introduce a semantic rule that transforms nouns or definite descriptions into proper names and quasi-proper names, making the conceptual elements present in those expressions inactive and introducing a direct route from the proper name to the referent. Such a rule is synchronic, although it has diachronic consequences. Quasi-proper names can stimulate a debate about the function and role of proper names across cultures. I consider a number of expressions similar to quasi-proper names and I add the class of quasi-quasi-proper names (cases in which a term similar to a quasi-proper name can be used in vocatives but not in a subject-predicate structure, or, vice-versa, it can be used in a subject-predicate structure but not for vocatives).

In this paper, after outlining the general problem of the pragmatics of indirect reports, we dwell on two notoriously thorny problems: a) how do we interpret the pronominals contained in that-clauses of indirect reports; b) how do we interpret the presuppositions of that-clauses of indirect reports?. Theoretical considerations lead us in the direction of the idea that if two pragmatic principles clash, one should give way, but since we do not know which one has to give way, we should be prepared to accept that the strongest or highest-ranking principle will defeat the other. Here we encounter a Principle, which Capone brought our attention to, that is not usually discussed in pragmatic theories, but which seems to play a crucial role, at least sometimes:Do not expect the hearers and the speakers to do what is not possible for them to do. In this paper, we recognize that the problem of opacity is connected with the problem of voices: who is responsible for a given section of the utterance. Given the presence of polyphony, this problem can be resolved either through contextual clues or through pragmatic principles. We prefer to see the interplay of principles and contextual clues as one in which the interpretation process is pretty orderly, with general principles providing the defaults, while contextual clues occasionally defeat the defaults in certain problematic cases. However, the issue of responsibility, which we try to regiment through the Paraphrasis/Form-style principle, does not only concern the issue of opacity but also the issue of how to find a referent for indexical expressions contained in the that-clause of a report and and how to satisfy the presuppositions of the that-clause. In this case the Paraphrasis/Form-style Principle makes wrong predictions, which have to be rectified thanks to a different principle. The pragmatic theory we apply certainly needs some flexibility, but a flexibility which is not injected into the theory by a mechanical ordering of the rules, but by explaining why a certain principle takes precedence over another in terms of considerations of rationality.

This monograph on indirect reports offers insights on the semantics/pragmatics interface and a refinement of the notion of explicature. The volume is written in an engaging style and guides the reader through the theoretical problems and their ramifications. The thorniest problem in the study of indirect reports is their polyphonic nature, and how the listener distinguishes between the reporter’s voice and the original speaker’s voice, either by contextual clues or, in the absence of such clues, by resorting to pragmatic principles. The introductory chapter discusses the main issues that will be addressed in the volume. The next chapters focus on the various aspects of indirect reports, covering both theory and practical applications.

In this paper, I start with the notion of reference as speaker’s meaning and then move on to consider García-Carpintero’s (2000) idea that a conceptual dimension of referential expressions can be captured through a notion of presupposition. I argue that we need to distinguish between reference and referential presupposition. The reference has a perceptual dimension and offers the speaker and the hearer an anchor to the present. Even when a speaker uses an NP that does not denote the object s/he intends to refer to (e.g., for a perceptual mistake), the context and environmental information can help the hearer find a route to the referent intended by the speaker. On the other hand, presuppositions seem to be of a conversational nature and involve a mode of presentation that is linguistically expressed.

In this book, I shall argue that there is a close relationship between pragmalinguistics and philosophy and that pragmalinguistics not only takes into account empirical investigations based on language use, but also takes advantage of a more philosophical approach to language, where a number of a priori considerations can be applied to the formation of a theory of language. While there is no reason to deny (and there is every reason to assume) that abstract structures of language are operative in selecting meanings, pragmatics usually provides additional theoretical baggage and allows language users to expand on their limited resources, thus allowing them to be open to new uses which then, eventually, become part of the semantic/syntactic heritage. These expansion processes can be seen both at the semantic and at the syntactic level (see Huang 1994, 2000, 2014; Levinson 2000; Ariel 2008 on the syntax/pragmatics debate). Surely there are a number of controversial points in pragmatics. Are the conversational maxims a priori principles? Are they innate or are they learned? Are they derived from innate predispositions, where, ultimately, they are propagated, transmitted and inherited at the level of language use? These are important theoretical questions, on which a philosophical approach has some bearing. However, in this book I will not concentrate on these questions, but I will broach more modest topics. One of the topics I will confront is whether explicatures (or at least the pragmatic components of explicatures) are cancellable or not. This topic is concatenated with the more heavily theoretical topic of Grice’s circle, a theoretical difficulty noted by Levinson (2000) which basically amounts to the claim that pragmatics takes input from semantics. However, the camp of contextualists has shown that (propositional) semantics cannot be independent of pragmatics, given that it is accepted that, in numerous cases, we must assume pragmatic intrusion into truth-conditional meaning. Thus, it follows that not only is it the case that pragmatics takes input from semantics, but that semantics takes input from pragmatics. There may be two ways of breaking out of this circle. One is to argue, as I have done so in the past, that the circle is not pernicious given that explicatures (that is, the engine of the semantics/pragmatics debate) are after all, in principle and de facto, not cancellable. Thus, the pragmatic contributions that intrude into semantics acquire some of the features of semantics (like entailments, they cannot be cancelled on pain of contradiction or logical absurdity). The other is to reduce the circle and to state that there are indeed (many) cases of pragmatic intrusion; however, we should not be so pessimistic as to claim that in all cases semantics needs to be augmented by pragmatics. There are sentences which can be fairly well understood even independently of pragmatics and, furthermore, there are sentences where limited amounts of pragmatic intrusion can occur and where such intrusions can be somehow ignored, since the truth-conditional content of the sentence can be grasped by making abstract substitutions such as X did Y (for example, in the sentence ‘He did this’). Such abstract substitutions are compatible with the spirit of semantics and capture a minimally augmented truth-conditional meaning, while one does not need to state that such cases cannot be understood without recourse to drastic pragmatic intrusion (Take as an example what happens during a grammar lesson. The teacher writes the sentence ‘Mary is clever’ on the blackboard. The students will not try to anchor ‘Mary’ to a referent, as they are well aware that this is an example).

Together with the volume “Inquiries in philosophical pragmatics: Linguistic and theoretical issues,” this book collects selected contributions to the conference Pragmasophia II held in Lisbon in 2018. This first volume intends to contribute to the dialogue between philosophers and linguists, trying to broaden the boundaries of this discipline defined by the crucial notions of context and verbal action. To this purpose, the contributions are collected in an order that reflects the core and the frontiers of pragmatics, the former constituted by the classical and more philosophical topics as quantifiers, semantic intentions and semantics, and common knowledge, and the latter exploring areas such as the relationship between pragmatics and other fields, such as argumentation and discourse analysis. Between these two poles of theoretical developments, we can find new theoretical challenges to some basic pragmatic problems, such as pure indexicals, deferred reference, polysemy, explicatures and indirect reports.

In this paper, I offer some considerations on the contextual dimension of reference and, then, I expatiate on the possibility that referential NPs refer to objects but at the same time they are linked with a conceptual presupposition, that explains why reference only does not work and is not an efficient way to represent certain NPs. I compare this issue of a conceptual presuppositions with the considerations on pragmatic or conversational presuppositions in papers by Capone or Macagno and Capone.

The problem of establishing the best interpretation of a speech act is of fundamental importance in argumentation and communication in general. A party in a dialogue can interpret another’s or his own speech acts in the most convenient ways to achieve his dialogical goals. In defamation law this phenomenon becomes particularly important, as the dialogical effects of a communicative move may result in legal consequences. The purpose of this paper is to combine the instruments provided by argumentation theory with the advances in pragmatics in order to propose an argumentative approach to meaning reconstruction. This theoretical proposal will be applied to and tested against defamation cases at common law. Interpretation is represented as based on a hierarchy of interpretative presumptions. On this view, the development of the logical form of an utterance is regarded as the result of an abductive pattern of reasoning in which various types of presumptions are confronted and the weakest ones are excluded. Conflicts of interpretations and equivocation become essentially interwoven with the dialectical problem of fulfilling the burden of defeating a presumption. The interpreter has a burden of explaining why a given presumption is subject to default, assuming that the speaker is reasonable and acting based on a set of shared expectations.

Together with the volume “Inquiries in philosophical pragmatics: Theoretical developments,” this book collects selected contributions to the conference Pragmasophia II held in Lisbon in 2018. The eleven essays of this volume focus on how a linguistic structure or expression manifests a pragmatic phenomenon, and are ordered considering their relationship with the specificity of the context. The first three papers, devoted to the topics of prototype-based generalizations, scalar implicatures, and temporal ordering, propose new insights into pragmatic phenomena considering linguistic behavior independent of the social activity in which it is placed. In the last papers, the analytical and empirical goal becomes predominant. Here, the theoretical advances are considered as instruments for analyzing specific texts, such as marketplace interactions, courtroom speech, schizophrenic discourse, narratives of literary texts for children or deception in movies. In between, three papers devoted to emotive or loaded words bridge the passage from more theoretical to more empirical and context-oriented works.

In this paper, I explore Bach’s idea (Bach, 2000) that null appositives, intended as expanded qua-clauses, can resolve the puzzles of belief reports. These puzzles are crucial in understanding the semantics and pragmatics of belief reports and are presented in a section. I propose that Bach’s strategy is not only a way of dealing with puzzles, but also an ideal way of dealing with belief reports. I argue that even simple unproblematic cases of belief reports are cases of pragmatic intrusion, involving null appositives, or to use the words of Bach, ‘qua-clauses’. The main difference between my pragmatic approach and the one by Salmon (1986) is that this author uses the notion of conversational implicature, whereas I use the notion of pragmatic intrusion and explicature. From my point of view, statements such as ‘‘John believes that Cicero is clever’’ and ‘‘John believes that Tully is clever’’ have got distinct truth-values. In other words, I claim that belief reports in the default case illuminate the hearer on the mental life of the believer, that includes specific modes of presentation of the referents talked about. Furthermore, while in the other pragmatic approaches, it is mysterious how a mode of presentation is assumed to be the main filter of the believer’s mental life, here I provide an explanatory account in terms of relevance, cognitive effects, and processing efforts. The most important part of the paper is devoted to showing that null appositives are required, in the case of belief reports, to explain certain anaphoric effects, which would otherwise be mysterious. My examples show that null appositives are not necessitated at logical form, but only at the level of the explicature, in line with the standard assumptions by Carston and Recanati on pragmatic intrusion. I develop a potentially useful analysis of belief reports by exploiting syntactic and semantic considerations on presuppositional clitics in Romance.

Indirect reports are segments of speech involving a dialogic dimension and thus studying them offers a chance to linguistics to appropriate again its original status as a theory that deals with linguistic signs and communication. The practice of indirect reporting intersects with a theory of knowledge, as, through the indirect report, knowledge is imparted on the basis of which the Hearer will decide whether to act or not and how s/he should take action. In this chapter, I discuss the issue of opacity and try to defend a pragmatic view of opacity in connection with indirect reports. I try to explain opacity pragmatically, although I accept that there are numerous exceptions one has to account for. In this paper, I also consider the issue of slurs, in terms of opacity of the pragmatic kind and I then accept that we have to consider the societal constraints on the use/mention of slurs.

In this chapter, I reconsider the discussion of the semantics/pragmatics debate and rejuvenate it by means of two important ideas: Grice’s circle (discussed by Levinson (Presumptive meanings, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000)) is apparent and certainly not pernicious; the fact that explicatures are not cancellable means that the pragmatics we consider in pragmatic intrusion has some features in common with truth-conditional semantics.One of the topics I will be confronted with is whether explicatures (or at least the pragmatic components of explicatures) are cancellable or not. This topic is concatenated with the more heavily theoretical topic of Grice’s circle, a theoretical difficulty noted by Levinson (Presumptive meanings, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2000), which can be summarized as follows. It is claimed that pragmatics takes input from semantics. However, the camp of contextualists have shown that (propositional) semantics cannot be independent of pragmatics, given that it is accepted that in numerous cases we must assume pragmatic intrusion into truth-conditional meaning. Thus, it follows that not only is it the case that pragmatics takes input from semantics, but that semantics takes input from pragmatics. There may be two ways of breaking out of this circle. One is to argue, as I have done, that the circle is not pernicious given that explicatures (which are the engine of the semantics/pragmatics debate) are, in principle and in fact, not cancellable after all. Thus, the pragmatic contributions that intrude into semantics acquire some of the features of semantics (like entailments, they cannot be cancelled on pain of contradiction). The other is to reduce the circle and to state that there are indeed (many) cases of pragmatic intrusion; however we should not be so pessimistic as to claim that in all cases semantics needs to be augmented by pragmatics. There are sentences which can be fairly well understood even independently of pragmatics and, furthermore, there are sentences where limited amounts of pragmatic intrusion can occur and where such intrusions can be somehow ignored since the truth-conditional content of the sentence can be grasped by making abstract substitutions such as X did Y (for example, in the sentence, ‘He did this’).

Together with the first volume “Inquiries in philosophical pragmatics: Theoretical developments,” this book collects contributions that represent the state of the art on the interconnection between pragmatics and philosophy. While the first volume presents the philosophical dimension of pragmatics, showing the path from theoretical advances to practical uses and approaches, this second volume offers a specular view on this discipline. Instead of adopting the top-down view of the first volume, this collection of eleven chapters starts from the analysis of linguistic data – which include texts and discourses in different languages, different types of dialogues, different types of interactions, and different modes for expressing meaning – looking for the regularities that govern our production and processing. The chapters are ordered according to their relationship with the themes and methods that define the field of pragmatics. The more explored and classical linguistic issues such as prototype-based generalizations, scalar implicatures, and temporal ordering, lead gradually to the more recent and debated topic of slurs and pejorative language, and finally to the interdisciplinary and more pioneering works addressing specific context of language use, such as marketplace interactions, courtroom speeches, schizophrenic discourse, literary texts for children, and multimedia communication.

The recent debate on pragmatics and the law has found ways to circumvent an important distinction, originally drawn by Dascal and Wróblewski (1991), between the historical law-maker, the current law-maker, and the ideal/rational law-maker.1 By insisting on the relationship between the rational law-maker and contextualism and textualism (see Manning 2005, 2006), I want to redress this fault in current discussions. In this paper, I start with general considerations on pragmatics, intentionality in ordinary conversation, and intentionality in the context of judiciary proceedings and legal texts. I then move on to considerations on rationality as a prerequisite for understanding the law and on the rational law-maker, an ideal construct proposed by Dascal and Wróblewski (1991). I argue that contextualism (of the moderate kind) is the best way to carry out the program by Dascal and Wróblewski on interpretation and the rational law-maker (also see considerations by Fish 2005); (on contextualism see Dascal and Weizman 1987). I argue that bearing in mind the rational law-maker postulated by Dascal and Wróblewski is a guidance to interpretation of statutes whose texts create interpretative difficulties. I conclude by saying that the considerations on the rational law-maker constitute a compromise between Scalia’s (1997) textualism and contextualism (see Manning 2005, 2006 on the divide between textualism and contextualism).

This book contains essential contributions to enrich and broaden the application field of pragmatics. It provides an example of how the fruitful reflections and refined conceptual distinctions born in the philosophical field can find a practical application in addressing social, cognitive, clinical, and psychological problems. Its chapters address, from different points of view, the relationship between pragmatic linguistics and philosophy, and outline the possible application of pragmatic theories to different domains. Developed during the third Pragmasophia international conference, whose name is derived from the Greek terms πρᾶγμα (action, fact) and σοφία (knowledge, science), the book aligns itself with its aim to study human actions and activities and how they take shape through language. But ‘Pragma’ and ‘Sophia’ also signal another purpose: highlighting the importance of creating links between empirical investigations on language use, and more traditional philosophical approaches. In this reading, ‘Pragma’ represents the experimental goal devoted to analysing and interpreting language facts. In contrast, the term ‘Sophia’ recalls the original vocation of past philosophers to pursue an ideal of ‘pure knowledge’, disconnected from any practical-economic interest. While maintaining the conference's original purpose of encouraging productive comparisons between different approaches, the book consists of two sections: first, on philosophical approaches, recalls more theoretical aspects (closer to the term ‘Sophia’); the second, ‘Inferential and Cognitive Pragmatics,’ addresses more practical issues affecting domains such as Greek literature, pragmatic disorders, dictionary entries, and speech analysis. The reader, whether in linguists, philosophy or psychology, obtains a complete overview of the most advanced current research lines, both theoretical and empirical, and thus contributes to broadening the scope of pragmatics.

Together with the volume “Inquiries in philosophical pragmatics: Linguistic and theoretical issues,” this book collects selected contributions to the conference Pragmasophia II held in Lisbon in 2018. This first volume intends to contribute to the dialogue between philosophers and linguists, trying to broaden the boundaries of this discipline defined by the crucial notions of context and verbal action. To this purpose, the contributions are collected in an order that reflects the core and the frontiers of pragmatics, the former constituted by the classical and more philosophical topics as quantifiers, semantic intentions and semantics, and common knowledge, and the latter exploring areas such as the relationship between pragmatics and other fields, such as argumentation and discourse analysis. Between these two poles of theoretical developments, we can find new theoretical challenges to some basic pragmatic problems, such as pure indexicals, deferred reference, polysemy, explicatures and indirect reports.

This volume highlights important aspects of the complex relationship between common language and legal practice. It hosts an interdisciplinary discussion between cognitive science, philosophy of language and philosophy of law, in which an international group of authors aims to promote, enrich and refine this new debate. Philosophers of law have always shown a keen interest in cognitive science and philosophy of language in order to find tools to solve their problems: recently this interest was reciprocated and scholars from cognitive science and philosophy of language now look to the law as a testing ground for their theses. Using the most sophisticated tools available to pragmatics, sociolinguistics, cognitive sciences and legal theory, an interdisciplinary, international group of authors address questions like: Does legal interpretation differ from ordinary understanding? Is the common pragmatic apparatus appropriate to legal practice? What can pragmatics teach about the concept of law and pervasive legal phenomena such as testimony or legal disagreements?

This volume is written in memory of Sorin Stati. The authors of this volume mainly deal with perspectives on language use and pragmatics. Each of them has his/her own approach, so the volume should not be taken as representing a single school of thought. Of course, the ideas expressed in all of the articles are reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s position which privileged meaning as use. We use language to do many things, to give and to obtain, to persuade and to order, to interact and create human bonds. Words and sentences acquire meaning in context, thus a decontextualized approach must be delegitimized. What the authors in this collection do is to place emphasis on the power of context and cotext to create meaning through myriad relations among the constituents of sentences, and among utterances themselves, which are arranged in discourse following an argumentative logic.

In this chapter I have used pronominal clitics in Italian in combination with verbs of propositional attitude to shed light on the opacity effects caused by intrusive pragmatics (at the level of free enrichments/explicatures). Certain problems, as discussed by Schiffer (Propositional attitudes in direct-reference semantics. In: Jaszczolt, Katarzyna (ed) The pragmatics of propositional attitude reports. Elsevier, Oxford, pp 14–30, 2000), completely disappear when the syntax, semantics and pragmatics of propositional clitics are discussed and such considerations are extended to propositional attitudes in general. In this chapter, I will add that a propositional clause must be in an appositional relationship (resulting from free enrichment and, thus, not actually present in the syntax) with the that-clause embedded in verbs of propositional attitude. I consider the consequences of this position. One of the most cogent results of this chapter is that pronominal clitics refer back to full propositions (if they refer to propositions at all) and not to minimal propositions. I take my own considerations on clitics to give support to the interesting and important considerations on emergent presuppositions by Kecskes and Zhang (Pragmat Cogn 17/2:331–355, 2009).

In this chapter I expatiate on what happens when one has to indirectly report ungrammatical utterances. How can the issue of grammatical, lexical and morphological errors affect our understanding of the practice of indirect reporting? What kind of problems are generated by such issues? The general practice seems to be to ignore or edit errors, when indirectly reporting them, concentrating on content. However, there are cases in which this practice is unsatisfactory and in which reporting has to resort to mixed quotation. Grammatical and morphological errors lead us to some paradoxes about indirect reporting (one of these being that sometimes it is impossible to provide an indirect report without resorting to mixed quotation) and, furthermore, lead us to revise the general considerations concerning the praxis of indirect reporting.

This chapter presents a purely pragmatic account of quotation and argues that it is able to accommodate all relevant linguistic phenomena. Given that it is more parsimonious to explain the data only by reference to pragmatic principles than to explain them by reference to both pragmatic and semantic principles, as is common in the literature, I conclude that the account of quotation I present is preferrable to the more standard accounts. Alternative theories of quotation are treated in an intellectually honest way.

This paper is an example of how contextual information interacts with the interpretation of noun phrases (NPs) in discourse. When we encounter an NP escorted by the definite article or a proper name, the expectation is triggered that the speaker is referring to some referent x that the hearer can normally identify. Strawson and Russell have agreed that a referent must be associated with a definite description so that the assertion containing it can be said to be true. In the case where a description does not refer to anything, the assertion is considered by Russell to be false, while Strawson says that the issue of truth or falsity does not arise. In this paper, we examine a case in which contextual information interacts with the interpretation of NPs in discourse and the hearer is not expected to identify a referent when hearing a proper name. In this case, the issue of truth or falsity does not arise, because the hearer does not identify the referent. In fact, s/he does not intend for the discourse to about a referent at all. These situations are primarily represented by sentences uttered during the course of a grammar lecture, in which the lecturer is explaining a rule of language and does not focus on external reality. The hearers are aware of this focus and do not process the NP (in general a proper name) to identify a specific referent. This discourse is of three types, which will be discussed at the end of this paper. Keywords: reference; pragmeme; presupposition; fictional discourse; exemplification acts.