Truth-Conditional Pragmatics

by François Recanati

Francois Recanati argues against the traditional understanding of the semantics/pragmatics divide and puts forward a radical alternative. Through half a dozen case studies, he shows that what an utterance says cannot be neatly separated from what the speaker means. In particular, the speaker's meaning endows words with senses that are tailored to the situation of utterance and depart from the conventional meanings carried by the words in isolation. This phenomenon of 'pragmatic modulation' must be taken into account in theorizing about semantic content, for it interacts with the grammar-driven process of semantic composition. Because of that interaction, Recanati argues, the content of a sentence always depends upon the context in which it is used. This claim defines Contextualism, a view which has attracted considerable attention in recent years, and of which Recanati is one of the main proponents.

Genres: Philosophy

334 pages, Paperback

First published September 29, 2010

About the author

François Recanati is a French analytic philosopher and research fellow at the College de France, and at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique. Many of his works focus on the philosophy of language and mind.

Reviews

[Larry · Rating 4 out of 5]

TCP brings together the context- and the compositionality principles by making the latter operate on pre-semantically, ie pragmatically modulated subsentential parts. Interesting views on closed quotation. Very convincing overall