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Thoughts and Utterances: The Pragmatics of Explicit Communication
"Thoughts and Utterances" is the first sustained investigation of two distinctions which are fundamental to all theories of utterance the semantics/pragmatics distinction and the distinction between what is explicitly communicated and what is implicitly communicated. Features the first sustained investigation of both the semantics/pragmatics distinction and the distinction between what is explicitly and implicitly communicated in speech.
- GenresLinguisticsPhilosophy
432 pages, ebook
First published January 1, 2002
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September 4, 2007
I was enjoying reading Hume, Kant and Mill for the Phil Perspectives class. Now I'm back to reading for the dissertation, worrying about technical senses of "what is said".
This is a massive overview of the literature on the pragmatics of communication. It covers Grice's views, various Neo-Griceans, relevance theory, and affiliated characters like Bach and Recanati. Carston herself advocates a streamlined form of relevance theory, which uses general considerations about cognitive processing and interpretation to explain everything from different ways of understanding "and" and "not" to loose use, metaphor, and Travis-like phenomena. There are hundreds of examples, which can be overwhelming for philosophers, who are used to staring long and hard at one or two examples in a given area ("A bachelor is an unmarried male"/"The leaves are green"/ "Add two"/ "X is good" etc.).
In the taxonomy of varieties of contextualism, this is "radical" contextualism, because it maintains that there are no sentences that determine propositions/truth conditions without some contribution from context sensitive pragmatic effects. But it isn't "Wittgensteinian" contextualism (of the Travis/Searle variety) because it makes use of the idea of a non-context-sensitive metalanguage (that is, that it doesn't think that the terms that the theory uses are themselves context-sensitive).
This is a massive overview of the literature on the pragmatics of communication. It covers Grice's views, various Neo-Griceans, relevance theory, and affiliated characters like Bach and Recanati. Carston herself advocates a streamlined form of relevance theory, which uses general considerations about cognitive processing and interpretation to explain everything from different ways of understanding "and" and "not" to loose use, metaphor, and Travis-like phenomena. There are hundreds of examples, which can be overwhelming for philosophers, who are used to staring long and hard at one or two examples in a given area ("A bachelor is an unmarried male"/"The leaves are green"/ "Add two"/ "X is good" etc.).
In the taxonomy of varieties of contextualism, this is "radical" contextualism, because it maintains that there are no sentences that determine propositions/truth conditions without some contribution from context sensitive pragmatic effects. But it isn't "Wittgensteinian" contextualism (of the Travis/Searle variety) because it makes use of the idea of a non-context-sensitive metalanguage (that is, that it doesn't think that the terms that the theory uses are themselves context-sensitive).
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