## 1. Introduction



Pragmatics deals with *utterances*, by which we will mean
specific events, the intentional acts of speakers at times and places,
typically involving language. Logic and semantics traditionally deal
with properties of *types* of expressions, and not with
properties that differ from token to token, or use to use, or, as we
shall say, from utterance to utterance, and vary with the particular
properties that differentiate them. Pragmatics is sometimes
characterized as dealing with the effects of *context*. This is
equivalent to saying it deals with utterances, if one collectively
refers to all the facts that can vary from utterance to utterance as
'context.' One must be careful, however, for the term is
often used with more limited meanings.



Different theorists have focused on different properties of
utterances. To discuss them it will be helpful to make a distinction
between 'near-side pragmatics' and 'far-side
pragmatics.' The picture is this. The utterances philosophers
usually take as paradigmatic are assertive uses of declarative
sentences, where the speaker *says* something. *Near-side
pragmatics* is concerned with the nature of certain facts that are
relevant to determining what is said. *Far-side pragmatics* is
focused on what happens *beyond saying*: what speech acts are
performed *in* or *by* saying what is said, or
*what* implicatures (see below for an explanation of these
terms) are generated by saying what is said.



Near-side pragmatics includes, but is not limited to resolution of
ambiguity and vagueness, the reference of proper names, indexicals and
demonstratives, and anaphors, and at least some issues involving
presupposition. In all of these cases facts about the utterance,
beyond the expressions used and their meanings, are needed.



We can divide these facts into several categories. For indexicals such
as 'I,' 'now,' and 'here,' basic
facts about the utterance are required: the agent, and when and where
it occurred. For other indexicals and demonstratives, speaker
intentions are also relevant. While it seems the referent of
'you' must be a person addressed by the speaker, which of
several possible addressees is referred to seems up to the
speaker's intentions. Within syntactic and semantic constraints,
anaphoric relations seem largely a matter of speaker's intent.
Speaker's intentions and the way the speaker is connected to the
wider world by causal/historical 'chains of reference' are
relevant to the reference of proper names.



Far-side pragmatics deals with what we do with language,
*beyond* what we (literally) say. This is the conception
according to which Voltaire's remarks belong to pragmatics.
It's up to semantics to tell us what someone literally says when
they use expressions of a given type; it's up to pragmatics to
explain the information one conveys, and the actions one performs, in
or by saying something.



Pragmatics is usually thought to involve a different sort of
*reasoning* than semantics. Semantics consists of conventional
rules of meaning for expressions and their modes of combination. Locke
supposed that communication was basically a matter of a speaker
encoding thoughts into words and the listener decoding words back into
thoughts. The same basic picture is found fairly explicitly in
Saussure and other influential theorists. This picture seems to fit
reasonably well with the picture that emerged from the logicians and
philosophers of language in the tradition of logical analysis, of
language as a system of phonological, syntactic and semantic rules, of
which competent speakers and interpreters have implicit mastery.
Paradigmatically, the sincere speaker plans to produce an utterance
with the truth-conditions of a belief she wishes to express; she
chooses her words so that her utterance has those truth-conditions;
the credulous interpreter needs to perceive the utterance, and
recognize which phones, morphemes, words and phrases are involved, and
then using knowledge of the meanings, deduce the truth-conditions of
the utterance and of the belief it expresses.



In contrast, pragmatics involves perception augmented by some species
of 'ampliative' inference -- induction, inference to
the best explanation, Bayesian reasoning, or perhaps some special
application of general principles special to communication, as
conceived by Grice (see below) -- but in any case a sort of
reasoning that goes beyond the application of rules, and makes
inferences beyond what is established by the basic facts about what
expressions are used and their meanings.



The facts with which pragmatics deals are of various sorts,
including:


* Facts about the objective facts of the utterance, including: who
the speaker is, when the utterance occurred, and where;
* Facts about the speaker's intentions. On the near side, what
language the speaker intends to be using, what meaning she intends to
be using, whom she intends to refer to with various shared names,
whether a pronoun is used demonstratively or anaphorically, and the
like. On the far side, what she intends to achieve by saying what she
does.
* Facts about beliefs of the speaker and those to whom she speaks,
and the conversation they are engaged in; what beliefs do they share;
what is the focus of the conversation, what are they talking about,
etc.
* Facts about relevant social institutions, such as promising,
marriage ceremonies, courtroom procedures, and the like, which affect
what a person accomplishes in or by saying what she does.



We will divide our discussion, somewhat arbitrarily, into the
'Classic Pragmatics' and 'Contemporary
pragmatics.' The Classic Period, by our reckoning, stretches
from the mid-sixties until the mid-eighties.


## 2. Classical Pragmatics


### 2.1 Far-side Pragmatics: Beyond Saying



Our initial focus will be on the traditions in pragmatics inaugurated
by the J. L. Austin and H. P. Grice. Both of these philosophers were
interested in the area of pragmatics we call 'beyond
saying.' In the classic period, these phenomena were studied on
the premise -- a premise increasingly undermined by developments
in pragmatics itself -- that a fairly clear distinction could be
made between what is said, the output of the realm of semantics, and
what is conveyed or accomplished in particular linguistic and social
context in or by saying something, the realm of pragmatics. What is
said is sort of a boundary; semantics is on the near side, and those
parts of pragmatics that were the focus of the classic period are on
the far side.


#### 2.1.1 Austin, Searle, and Speech Acts



The British philosopher John Langshaw Austin (b. 1911-d. 1960)
was intrigued by the way that we can use words to do different things.
Whether one asserts or merely suggests, promises or merely indicates
an intention, persuades or merely argues, depends not only on the
literal meaning of one's words, but what one intends to do with
them, and the institutional and social setting in which the linguistic
activity occurs. One thing a speaker might intend to do, and be taken
to do, in saying "I'll be there to pick you up at
six," is to *promise* to pick her listener up at that
time. The ability to promise and to intend to promise arguably depends
on the existence of a social practice or set of conventions about what
a promise is and what constitutes promising. Austin especially
emphasized the importance of social facts and conventions in doing
things with words, in particular with respect to the class of speech
acts known as *illocutionary acts*. 



Austin began by distinguishing between what he called
'constatives' and 'performatives.' A
constative is simply saying something true or false. A performative is
*doing* something by speaking; paradigmatically, one can get
married by saying "I do" (Austin 1961). Constatives are
true or false, depending on their correspondence (or not) with the
facts; performatives are actions and, as such, are not true or false,
but 'felicitous' or 'infelicitous,' depending
on whether or not they successfully perform the action in question. In
particular, performative utterances to be felicitous (i) must invoke
an existing convention and (i) the convention must be invoked in the
right circumstances.



A clear delimitation between performatives and constatives proved to
be difficult to establish, however. There are explicit performatives;
a verb used in a certain way makes explicit the action being
performed: "I bet that there is a dangerous animal there,"
"I guarantee that there is a dangerous animal there,"
"I warn you that there is a dangerous animal there." But
the same action could be performed implicitly: "There is a
dangerous animal there," where both issues of (in)felicities and
issues of truth/falsity are simultaneously present. Instead of
pursuing the distinction between performatives and constatives, Austin
(1962a) proposed a new three-fold distinction.



According to this trichotomy, a speech act is, first of all, a
locutionary act, that is, an act of saying something. Saying something
can also be viewed from three different perspectives: (i) as a
*phonetic* act: uttering certain noises; (ii) as a
*phatic* act: uttering words "belonging to and as
belonging to, a certain vocabulary, conforming to and as conforming to
a certain grammar"; and (iii) as a *rhetic* act: uttering
words "with a certain more-or-less definite sense and
reference" (Austin 1962a, 95). Now, to perform a locutionary act
is also in general to perform an illocutionary act; *in*
performing a locutionary act, we perform an act with a certain
*force*: ordering, warning, assuring, promising, expressing an
intention, and so on. And *by* doing that, we will normally
produce "certain consequential effects upon the feelings,
thoughts or actions of the audience, or of the speaker, or of other
persons" (ibidem, 101) that Austin calls
*perlocutionary*. At the point of his untimely death,
Austin's work on speech act theory was far from complete. His
main work, *How to do things with words* was published
posthumously, based on lecture notes of Austin and his students.



Austin's student, John R. Searle (1969) developed speech act
theory as a theory of the *constitutive* rules for performing
illocutionary acts, i.e., the rules that tell what performing
(successfully) an illocutionary act (with certain illocutionary force
and certain propositional content) consists in. The rules are
classified as (i) propositional content rules, which put conditions on
the propositional content of some illocutionary acts; (ii) preparatory
rules, which tell what the speaker will imply in the performance of
the illocutionary acts; (iii) sincerity rules, that tell what
psychological state the speaker expresses to be in; and (iv) essential
rules, which tell us what the action consists in
*essentially*.



Let's return to our case of promising. According to
Searle's analysis, for an utterance by *S* to *H*
to count as a promise must meet the following conditions:


* The propositional content represents some future action *A*
by *S*;
* *H* prefers *S*'s doing *A* to her not
doing it, and *S* believes that to be so; and it is not obvious
both to *S* and *H* that *S* will do *A*
in the normal course of events;
* *S* intends to do *A*; and
* Promising counts as the undertaking of an obligation of *S*
to do *A*.



If someone, then, wants to make a (felicitous) promise she must meet
these conventional conditions. The study of these conventional
conditions for illocutionary acts, together with the study of their
correct taxonomy constitutes the core of speech act theory.



Based on their essential conditions, and attending to the minimal
purpose or intention of the speaker in performing an illocutionary
act, Searle (1975a) proposes a taxonomy of illocutionary acts into
five mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive classes:


* *Representative* or *assertive*. The speaker becomes
committed to the truth of the propositional content; for example,
asserting: "It's raining."
* *Directive*. The speaker tries to get the hearer to act in
such a way as to fulfill what is represented by the propositional
content; for example, commanding: "Close the door!"
* *Commissive*. The speaker becomes committed to act in the
way represented by the propositional content; for example, promising:
"I'll finish the paper by tomorrow."
* *Expressive*. The speaker simply expresses the sincerity
condition of the illocutionary act: "I'm glad it's
raining!"
* *Declarative*. The speaker performs an action just
representing herself as performing that action: "I name this
ship the Queen Elizabeth."



Speech act theory, then, adopts a social or institutional view of
linguistic meaning. This is sometimes opposed to the intentionalist
view favored by Grice (1957) and Strawson (1964), but there need be no
inconsistency. (For an interesting discussion on the relationship
between intentionalist and social, institutional and intersubjective
views on meaning and communication by Searle, Bennett, Habermas and
Appel, see part I of Lepore & Van Gulick 1991.)


#### 2.1.2 Grice and Conversational Implicatures



Herbert Paul Grice (b. 1913-d. 1988) emphasized the distinction
Voltaire makes, in our opening quotation, between what words mean,
what the speaker literally says when using them, and what the speaker
means or intends to communicate by using those words, which often goes
considerably beyond what is said. I ask you to lunch and you reply,
"I have a one o'clock class I'm not prepared
for." You have conveyed to me that you will not be coming to
lunch, although you haven't literally *said* so. You
intend for me to figure out that by indicating a reason for not coming
to lunch (the need to prepare your class) you intend to convey that
you are not coming to lunch for that reason. The study of such
*conversational implicatures* is the core of Grice's
influential theory. 



Grice's so-called theory of conversation starts with a sharp
distinction between what someone says and what someone
'implicates' by uttering a sentence. What someone says is
determined by the conventional meaning of the sentence uttered and
contextual processes of disambiguation and reference fixing; what she
implicates is associated with the existence of some rational
principles and maxims governing conversation (setting aside
'conventional implicatures' which we discuss below). What
is said has been widely identified with the literal content of the
utterance; what is implicated, the implicature, with the non-literal,
what it is (intentionally) communicated, but not said, by the speaker.
Consider his initial example:



> 
> A and B are talking about a mutual friend, C, who is now working in a
> bank. A asks B how C is getting on in his job, and B replies: *Oh
> quite well, I think; he likes his colleagues, and he hasn't been
> to prison yet.* (Grice 1967a/1989, 24.)
> 



What did B say by uttering "he hasn't been to prison
yet"? Roughly, all he literally said of C was that he
hasn't been to prison up to the time of utterance. This is what
the conventional sentence meaning plus contextual processes of
disambiguation, precisification of vague expressions and reference
fixing provide.



But, normally, B would have *implicated* more than this: that C
is the sort of person likely to yield to the temptation provided by
his occupation. According to Grice, the 'calculation' of
conversational implicatures is grounded on common knowledge of what
the speaker has said (or better, the fact that she has said it), the
linguistic and extra linguistic context of the utterance, general
background information, and the consideration of what Grice dubs the
'Cooperative Principle (CP)':



> 
> Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the
> stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the
> talk exchange in which you are engaged. (Grice 1967a/1989, 26.)
> 



**The maxims**



According to Grice, the CP is implemented, in the plans of speakers
and understanding of hearers, by following 'maxims:'


* *Quantity*
	+ Make your contribution as informative as is required (for the
	current purposes of the exchange).
	+ Do not make your contribution more informative than is
	required.
* *Quality*
	+ (Supermaxim): Try to make your contribution one that is true.
	+ (Submaxims):
		- Do not say what you believe to be false.
		- Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
* *Relation*
	+ Be relevant.
* *Manner*
	+ (Supermaxim): Be perspicuous.
	+ (Submaxims):
		- Avoid obscurity of expression.
		- Avoid ambiguity.
		- Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity).
		- Be orderly.
		- Frame whatever you say in the form most suitable for any reply
		that would be regarded as appropriate; or, facilitate in your form of
		expression the appropriate reply (added by Grice 1981/1989, 273).



Grice sees the principles governing conversation as derived from
general principles governing human rational cooperative action. There
has been much discussion about the CP and the maxims. Are all of them
necessary? Do we need more? Are they normative or descriptive?
What's their exact role in the theory of implicatures: Are they
principles that speakers and hearers are assumed to observe in
rational communication, or simply the theorist's tools for
rational reconstruction? Does the CP require from speaker and hearer
further cooperation towards a common goal beyond that of understanding
and being understood? What is clear is that Grice attributes to these
principles an essential role for the definition and the interpretation
of conversational implicatures.



**Implicatures**



The paradigmatic kind of reasoning on the part of the hearer for the
determination of implicatures, according to Grice, follows this
pattern:



> 
> He has said that *p*; there is no reason to suppose that he is
> not observing the maxims, or at least the CP; he could not be doing
> this unless he thought that *q*; he knows (and knows that I
> know that he knows) that I can see that the supposition that he thinks
> that *q* is *required*; he has done nothing to stop me
> thinking that *q*; he intends me to think, or is at least
> willing to allow me to think, that *q*; and so he has
> implicated that *q*. (Grice 1967a/1989, 31.)
> 



Applied to the earlier example, about the banker, *A* would
reason in the following way:



> 
> *B* has said that *C* has not been to prison yet
> (*p*); he is apparently flouting the maxim of relation
> ("Be relevant."), but I have no reason to suppose that he
> is opting out CP; his violation of the maxim would only be apparent if
> he is thinking that *C* is potentially dishonest (*q*);
> *B* knows (and knows that I know that he knows) that I can
> figure out he is thinking that *q*; ...; so he has
> implicated that *q*.
> 



Conversational implicatures have the following characteristics:


1. They are cancelable:


> 
> ... a putative conversational implicature that *p* is
> explicitly cancelable if, to the form of words the utterance of which
> putatively implicates that *p*, it is admissible to add but not
> *p*, or *I do not mean to imply that p*, and it is
> contextually cancelable if one can find situations in which the
> utterance of the form of words would simply not carry the implicature.
> (Grice 1967b/1989, 44.)
>
2. They are non-detachable:


> 
> ... it will not be possible to find another way of saying the
> same thing, which simply lacks the implicature in question, except
> where some special feature of the substituted version is itself
> relevant to the determination of an implicature (in virtue of one of
> the maxims of Manner). (Grice 1967a, 1989, 39.)
>
3. They are calculable:


> 
> The presence of a conversational implicature must be capable of being
> worked out; for even if it can in fact be intuitively grasped, unless
> the intuition is replaceable by an argument, the implicature (if
> present at all) will not count as a conversational implicature. (Grice
> 1967a/1989, 31.)
>



Grice considers this last property to be crucial for distinguishing
between conversational and conventional implicatures. Conventional
implicatures are generated by the meaning of certain particles like
'but' or 'therefore.' Consider the difference
between (1) and (2):


1. He is an Englishman, therefore he is brave.
2. He is an Englishman, and he is brave.



According to Grice, a speaker has *said* the same with (1) as
with (2). The difference is that with (1) she implicates (3). 



3. His being brave follows from his being English.



This is a *conventional* implicature. It is the conventional
meaning of 'therefore,' and not maxims of cooperation,
that carry us beyond what is said.



Grice's concept of conventional implicatures (which has
antecedents in Frege; see Bach 1999b) is the most controversial part
of his theory of conversation for many followers, for several reasons.
According to some, its application to particular examples runs against
common intuitions. By using the word 'therefore' is the
speaker not *saying* that there is some causal connection
between being brave and being English? Isn't she *saying*
and not merely implying that one's being brave follows from
one's being English? Moreover, the category of
*conventional* implicatures blurs the distinction between what
is said, usually conceived as determined by the semantic conventions
of language, and what is implicated, usually thought of as a matter of
the speaker's intentions in saying what she does. Conventional
sentence meaning contributes crucially to what is said, which is
considered essentially different from implicatures; but now we have
the result that some elements of conventional meaning do not
contribute to what is said but to implicatures (albeit conventional).
Finally, it places the study of the conventional meaning of some
expressions within the realm of pragmatics (study of implicatures),
rather than semantics, usually conceived as the home of conventional
meaning.



Among conversational implicatures, Grice distinguished between
'particularized' and 'generalized.' The former
are the implicatures that are generated by saying something in virtue
of some particular features of the context, "cases in which
there is no room for the idea that an implicature of this sort is
normally carried by saying that *p*." (Grice 1967a/1989,
37) The above example of conversational implicature is, then, a case
of particularized conversational implicature. A generalized
conversational implicature (henceforth GCI) occurs where "the
use of a certain forms of words in an utterance would normally (in the
absence of special circumstances) carry such-and-such an implicature
or type of implicature." (Ibid.). Grice's first example is
a sentence of the form "*X* is meeting a woman this
evening." Anyone who utters this sentence, in absence of special
circumstances, would be taken to implicate that the woman in question
was someone other than *X*'s "wife, mother, sister,
or perhaps even close platonic friend" (Ibid.) Being an
implicature, it could be cancelled, either implicitly, in appropriate
circumstances, or explicitly, adding some clause that implies its
denial.



Particularized conversational implicatures have a wide range of
applications that Grice himself illustrates: the informative use of
tautologies, irony, metaphor, hyperbole, meiosis and, in principle,
any kind of non-literal use that relies in special circumstances of
the utterance can be explained in terms of them. But GCIs apply to
philosophically more important issues, in particular, to what,
according to the introduction to "Logic and Conversation",
was Grice's most important motivation: the issue of the
difference of meaning between logical constants of formal languages
and their counterparts in natural languages, or the alleged meanings
of verbs like 'to look like,' 'to believe' or
'to know.' GCIs are also at the heart of Grice's
Modified Occam's Razor ("*Senses are not to be
multiplied beyond necessity*," Grice 1967b/1989, 47), which
has served as a criterion for distinguishing semantic issues from
pragmatic uses and for preferring, in general, an explanation in terms
of implicatures rather than a semantic one that postulates
ambiguity.



Grice is probably best known in the philosophy of language for his
theory of implicatures. It is surely his most influential body of work
for those parts of linguistics, psychology, cognitive science and
computer science that share philosophy's interest in language.
His theory of meaning, however, is indispensable for understanding his
overall philosophical vision and his 'big picture' of
language and communication. We will not explain this project, which
consists in part of ultimately reducing all semantic notions to
psychological ones. But we will say a bit about its central concept of
'M-intentions,' in order to develop an important aspect of
his pragmatic theory, the concept of a *communicative
intention*.



**Communicative intentions**



Grice conceived that semantic notions like word and sentence meaning
were ultimately based on speaker's meaning, and this on
speaker's intention, what he called *M-intentions*. What
he conceived as a study of the ontology of semantic notions has been
received, however, as a characterization of communicative intentions,
the mental causes of communicative acts, and those that the hearer has
to understand for the communicative act to be successful.



So conceived, communicative intentions have these characteristic
properties:


* They are always oriented towards some other agent -- the
addressee.
* They are overt, that is, they are intended to be recognized by the
addressee.
* Their satisfaction consists precisely in being recognized by the
addressee.



These properties are already pointed out in the first version of
Grice's M-intentions:



> 
> "A meant something by *x*" is (roughly) equivalent to
> "A intended the utterance of *x* to produce some effect in
> an audience by means of the recognition of this intention."
> (Grice 1957/1989, 220.)
> 



Grice later reformulated this definition, giving rise to a hot debate
about the precise characterization of communicative intentions, mainly
about two points:


1. Communicative intentions are intentions to produce some response
on the part of the addressee, but what kind of response, exactly,
should this be? Suppose I tell you, "It's raining."
This act may have many results: perhaps you will hear the words,
understand their meaning, come to believe that it is raining, search
for your umbrella, fail to find it and grow angry, and finally become
so angry you chew the rug. I may have planned all of this, but more
typically I will have had in mind that you be prepared for the
weather. But my communicative intention seems to be directed at a
crucial subgoal. If I get you to believe it is raining, your own
rationality will take over and you will get prepared. What I seem to
aim at is changing your beliefs. It was this sort of response that
Grice took to be typical in his early work on meaning. But it is
really more in line with the spirit of his proposal that the crucial
subgoal be to get the audience to believe that the speaker believes
that it is raining. That's really the change that language can
bring about; having gotten the audience that far, the speaker needs to
hope that the audience trusts her weather-knowledge, will take the
steps to themselves believing in rain, and then prepare adequately for
the weather.


But even this rather modest subgoal may be too much to require for the
success of the communicative action *qua* communicative action.
Suppose I say that it is raining, and you hear me and understand the
meaning of my words. But you don't think I am being sincere; you
don't believe that I believe what I said. But still, I have said
it. My overall plan to help insure that you don't get wet and
catch cold may fail, but I do seem to have succeeded in saying what I
set out to say. It seems that the only *new* mental state
needed is the audience's recognition of the speaker's
communicative intention; his understanding of the speaker's
utterance. This is what has been called 'illocutionary
uptake':



> 
> In the case of illocutionary acts we succeed in doing what we are
> trying to do by getting our audience to recognize what we are trying
> to do. But the 'effect' on the hearer is not a belief or a
> response, it consists simply in the hearer understanding the utterance
> of the speaker. (Searle 1969, 47.)
> 



So the most common answer has been to follow Searle on this point and
exclude perlocutionary results, beyond uptake of this sort, from the
content of communicative intentions.
2. Communicative intentions must be wholly overt:


> 
> The understanding of the force of an utterance in all cases involves
> recognizing what may be called broadly an audience-directed intention
> and recognizing it as wholly overt, as intended to be recognized.
> (Strawson 1964, 459.)
> 



The exact formulation of this requirement has been a subject of
intense debate, some arguing for a reflexive (self-referential)
definition, others for a potentially infinite but practically finite
number of clauses in the definition, with conceptual, logical or
psychological arguments. What seems to be a matter of consensus is
that every covert or even neutral (with respect to its intended
recognition by the addressee) aspect of the speaker's intention
must be left out of the definition of communicative intentions.



A short but comprehensive way of concluding would be to say that the
fulfillment of communicative intentions consists precisely in being
recognized by the addressee. (For this debate, see Searle 1969;
Schiffer 1972; Harman 1974; Blackburn 1984; Sperber and Wilson 1986;
Recanati 1986; Bach 1987 and Neale 1992.)


#### 2.1.3 Bach, Harnish, and a Unified Theory



After the founding work made in parallel by Austin-Searle, on the one
side, and by Grice, on the other, Kent Bach and Robert Harnish
(*Linguistic Communication and Speech Acts* (1979)) made an
important attempt to integrate the founders' insights in a
unified theory. 



On the whole, if choosing the appropriate label for their theory
between either 'neo-Gricean' or
'neo-Austinian/Searlean,' the first seem the most
appropriate: their theory might be taken to lean toward the Gricean
conception of inferential understanding of the speaker's
communicative intentions rather than to the Austin-Searle view of
speech acts as performed according to some conventional or
'constitutive' rules. To obtain a unified theory they
developed their own conceptual framework, based on the ideas of Grice,
Austin and Searle but including many important innovations of their
own. Here it is a brief description of some of them:



**Locutionary acts**



Like Austin, but unlike Searle, Bach and Harnish argue for the concept
of locutionary acts: acts of using sentences with "a more or
less definite 'sense' and a more or less definite
'reference,'" in Austin's words. They are more
explicit than Austin, and argue that determining what someone has
(locutionarily) said by uttering a sentence amounts to determining


1. the operative meaning of the sentence uttered
2. the referents for the referring expressions
3. the properties and relations being ascribed
4. the times specified



With this information the hearer identifies what a speaker has said,
at the locutionary level. From a contemporary perspective, the most
remarkable point here is, in our opinion, that they see the
determination of the locutionary act by the hearer, not as a matter of
merely decoding the conventional meaning of the sentence uttered, but
as a matter of inference that has to be based on linguistic meaning
plus contextual information concerning the speaker's intentions.
Grice did not claim that what a speaker said was determinable without
consideration of the speaker's intentions; quite the contrary.
But he was not particularly explicit about the way it was done, and
the received view, anyway, has been that inference was exclusive to
the 'calculation' of implicatures.



The distinction between locutionary and illocutionary acts of saying
also offers Bach and Harnish a useful conceptual tool for treating
potentially problematic cases of discordance between utterance content
and speaker's intentions, such as slips of the tongue, false
referential beliefs, and irony.



To go from the locutionary to the illocutionary content, if there is
any, the hearer has to infer the communicative intention of the
speaker, and to do that, the hearer needs more information. Among
other things, the hearer will have to make use of the Communicative
Presumption (CP) that they state as follows:



> 
> The mutual belief in the linguistic community *CL*
> to the effect that whenever a member *S* says something in
> *L* to another member *H*, he is doing so with some
> recognizable illocutionary intent. (Bach and Harnish 1979, 61.)
> 



**The taxonomy of illocutionary acts**



Bach and Harnish accept most of Searle's (1975a) critiques of
Austin's taxonomy as well as his criteria for grouping
illocutionary acts in terms of basic illocutionary intentions and
expression of mental attitudes; but they make some amendments. To
begin with, they discard Searle's class of *declarative*
illocutionary acts (basically covering Austin's explicit
performatives), because they take them to be basically
*assertives* or *constatives* (see Searle 1989, Bach and
Harnish 1992 for a further discussion of this issue). Then, the
communicative illocutionary acts are (Bach and Harnish 1979, ch.
3):


* *constatives*, that express a speaker's belief and
her desire that the hearer forms a similar one.
* *directives*, that express some attitude about a possible
future action by the hearer and the intention that her utterance be
taken as reason for the hearer's action.
* *commissives*, that express the speaker's intention
to do something and the belief that her utterance obliges her to do
it.
* *acknowledgments*, that express feelings toward the hearer
(or the intention that the utterance will meet some social
expectations regarding the expression of feelings).



Bach and Harnish make a distinction between *communicative
illocutionary acts*, the category to which these four types
belong, and the category of *conventional illocutionary acts*,
which they take to be fundamentally different. Communicative acts are
acts performed with certain communicative intentions whose recognition
by the hearer is necessary for the acts to be successful. In
conventional acts, on the other hand, no communicative intention need
be involved. Success is a matter of convention, not intention.
Conventional acts determine and produce facts of institutional nature,
if performed according to conventions that do not require any
communicative intention on the part of the speaker and, a fortiori,
neither its recognition on the part of any hearer. Among conventional
acts, Bach and Harnish (1979, ch. 6) distinguish between two
classes:


* *effectives*, that when produced by the appropriate person
in appropriate circumstances produce a change, a new fact in an
institutional context; an example might the President of the United
States statement that he vetoes a piece of legislation.
* *verdictives*, do not produce facts, but determine facts,
natural or institutional, with an official, binding effect in the
institutional context; an example is a jury's verdict of guilt;
it does not create the fact of guilt, but settles the issue of guilt
in a binding way.



**The SAS**



The Speech Act Schema (SAS) gives the form of the required reasoning
by the hearer to fully understand the speaker's utterance: from
the meaning of the sentence used all the way to the perlocutionary act
performed. This requires, besides linguistic information, a system of
communicative and conversational presumptions, together with
contextual mutual beliefs. 



Bach and Harnish think that inference is involved, from the beginning,
in the determination of the locutionary act. The next step is to infer
the literal illocutionary intentions and from here, in the simplest
case, go for the (intended) perlocutionary ones, if any. Roughly, an
illocutionary act is literal when its propositional content coincides
with the content of the locutionary act, and the force of the former
is within the constraints imposed by the latter.



But it may happen that the literal illocutionary act cannot be taken
as a reasonable thing to have been done by the speaker in some
specific circumstances (say, the literal claim is false and obviously
so), and the hearer has to search for another *non-literal*
act. Someone speaks non-literally when she does not mean what she says
but something else instead.



It can also be the case that the speaker is doing more than merely
performing a literal act. She means what she says but she means more.
The hearer will have to infer the *indirect* act being
performed. It must be noticed that indirect acts can also be based on
non-literal acts. Then the SAS extends to account for the intentional
perlocutionary effects of the speech act.



Bach and Harnish's SAS offers a detailed study of the structure
of utterance interpretation as an inferential process. Taken as an
attempt of unification of the two main roots of pragmatics, it can be
considered as the closing of the 'Classic Pragmatics'
period and the transition from 'philosophical' pragmatics
to linguistic and psychological pragmatics. They can be still located
within far-side pragmatics but their clear idea of the role of
pragmatic 'intrusion' in the determination of what is said
is announcing the arrival of near-side pragmatics.


### 2.2 Near-side Pragmatics



In logic and in many of the investigations of logical empiricists in
the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, artificial languages
were the focus of attention. First the predicate calculus, and then
various extensions of it incorporating modal and temporal operators
seemed the appropriate linguistic vehicles for clear-thinking
philosophers. Issues about the use of natural languages were often
thought to be beyond the scope of the proof-theoretic and
model-theoretic tools developed by logicians. As Stalnaker put it in
1970, 



> 
> The problems of pragmatics have been treated informally by
> philosophers in the ordinary language tradition, and by some
> linguists, but logicians and philosophers of a formalistic frame of
> mind have generally ignored pragmatic problems ... . (Stalnaker
> 1970/1999, 31.)
> 



(For an important exception, see Reichenbach's *Elements of
Symbolic Logic* (1947).) 



The idea that techniques of formal semantics should be adapted to
natural languages was forcefully defended by Donald Davidson, on
general philosophical principles, and Richard Montague, who applied
the techniques of possible worlds semantics to fragments of English in
a body of work that was influential in both philosophy and
linguistics.



These attempts make clear that, on the near side of what is said,
semantics and pragmatics are quite enmeshed. The interpretation of
indexicals and demonstratives seems squarely in the realm of
pragmatics, since it is particular facts about particular utterances,
such as the speaker, time, and location, that determine the
interpretation of 'I,' 'you,'
'now' and the like. But the relevance of these varying
factors is determined by a non-varying rule of meaning, as Bar-Hillel
(1954) had already observed.



In his essay "Pragmatics" (1968), Richard Montague
generalized the concept of a possible world to deal with a number of
phenomena, including indexicals. An index combines a possible world
with other factors relevant to the truth value of a sentence. To study
tensed sentences, for example, one incorporates times into indices. A
sentence like "Elwood went to the store," is true
*in* a world, *at* a time. A sentence like "I went
to the store," would be true *in* a world, *at* a
time, *for* a speaker: roughly, if the speaker went to the
store prior to the time in the world.



If we ignore time, we can think of the meaning of "I am
sitting" as a function from *pairs* of speakers and
worlds to truth-values. Suppose Moe is sitting in the actual world
*w* and standing in alternative world *w*', while
Curley is standing in *w* and sitting in *w*'.
"I am sitting" is true at <Moe, *w*> and
<Curley, *w*'>.



A somewhat different approach to indexicality, implemented in
different ways by David Kaplan and Robert Stalnaker, has been much
more influential, however. Here is how Stalnaker put the key idea:



> 
> The scheme I am proposing looks roughly like this: The syntactical and
> semantical rules for a language determine an interpreted sentence or
> clause: this, together with some features of the context of use of the
> sentence or clause determines a proposition; this in turn, together
> with a possible world, determines a truth-value. An interpreted
> sentence, then, corresponds to a function from contexts into
> propositions, and a proposition is a function from possible worlds
> into truth-values. (Stalnaker 1970/1999, 36.)
> 



Both of these philosophers develop a 'two-tiered' approach
to the content of utterances of sentences containing indexicals.
"I am sitting" expresses the proposition that Moe is
sitting in a context with Moe as speaker, a different proposition,
that Curley is sitting, in a context with Curley as speaker. Thus we
have two functions involved. The *character* (Kaplan) or
*propositional concept* (Stalnaker) is a function from contexts
to propositions. And, at least within possible worlds semantics,
propositions are conceived as functions from worlds to
truth-values.



This 'two-tiered' approach brings out what Moe's
utterance of "I am sitting," has and doesn't have in
common with Curley's utterance of "You are sitting,"
directed at Moe. They both have the same truth-value, of course, but
more importantly they express the same proposition, in spite of having
different meanings (characters, propositional concepts).



There are, however, important differences in the way Kaplan and
Stalnaker implement this idea, which reflect the very different ways
in which they think about context.


#### 2.2.1 Kaplan on Indexical and Demonstratives



The most influential treatment of indexicals and demonstratives has
probably been David Kaplan's monograph *Demonstratives*
(1989), versions of which were circulated in the seventies.
Kaplan's basic concepts are *context*,
*character*, and *content*. Character is what is
provided by sentences with indexicals, like "I am
sitting," or "You are sitting," a function from
contextual features to contents. 



For Kaplan, a context is a quadruple of an agent, location, time and
world; intuitively, these are the speaker of an utterance, the time
and location of the utterance, and the possible world in which it
occurs; the beliefs of the speaker as to who she is, where she is, and
when it is, and what the real world is like are irrelevant to
determining content, although not of course to explaining why the
speaker says what she does. (The possible world is the contextual
feature Kaplan uses to deal with "actually"). A proper
context is one in which the agent is at the location at the time in
the world, which is of course the characteristic relation among the
speaker, time, location and world of an utterance.



Kaplan did not officially take his theory to be a theory of
utterances. He thought of his account, or at least of the formal
theory he supplies, as a theory of *occurrences*, or
*sentences-in-context*, which are abstract objects consisting
of pairs of contexts and expression types. Utterances, Kaplan argues,
are an unsuitable subject matter for logical investigation. Utterances
take time, for one thing, so it would not be possible to insist that
all of the premises of an argument share the same context, but this
stipulation is needed for logic. For another, since any utterance of
"I am not speaking" would be false, we might have to
conclude that "I am speaking" is a logical truth, an
unwelcome result.



Kaplan does not call what he is doing "pragmatics" but the
*semantics* of indexicals and demonstratives.


#### 2.2.2 Pragmatic Puzzles of Referentialism



Kaplan's theory was part of a movement in the philosophy of
language that developed the sixties and seventies, which we will call
'referentialism.' For our purposes, the salient aspects of
referentialism are (i) in some forms, heavy reliance was made of the
concept of 'what is said,' -- often equated with
'the proposition expressed' -- by a particular
utterance of a suitably declarative sentence; (ii) referentialists
argued persuasively that 'what is said' or 'the
proposition expressed' depends on reference of names, indexicals
and demonstratives, rather than any descriptive 'backing'
or identifying conditions speakers or hearers might associate with
them. More controversially, Donnellan (1966) argued that in the case
of 'referential' uses of definite descriptions, the
reference of the description, rather than the descriptive condition,
is a constituent of the proposition expressed.



The question naturally raises, then, how does the referentialist
conception of what is said fit with Grice's theory of
conversation, which, as we have seen, pertains to the reasons the
speaker has for saying what she does.



It can be argued that Kaplan's concept of content fits in with
Grice's theory of conversation. For the purposes of formal
semantics and logic, the context (in Kaplan's sense) can be
taken as given. Kaplan treats both the sentence and the context as
abstract objects, and all of the rules of interpretation are suitably
deductive. Pragmatics begins when we apply Kaplan's theory to
utterances. Semantics and near-side pragmatics resolve reference, and
so what proposition is expressed, that is, what is said, by an
utterance involving the use of a sentence in a context. Then
Grice's theory of conversation, and the Austin-Searle theory of
speech acts, takes over to tell us what else the speaker has
implicated by saying what she did, and what else she has accomplished
in or by saying what she did.



This picture is not without problems, however. Referentialism seems to
bring in its wake various version of Frege's problem of
identity, and these are relevant to pragmatics.



Consider the statements "Hesperus is visible in the eastern
sky" and "Phosphorus is visible in the eastern sky."
On referentialist principles, the two statements express the same
proposition, the one that is true in all worlds in which Venus (the
planet that 'Hesperus' and 'Phosphorus' are
two names for) is visible in the eastern sky. But they seem to convey
different information. And, most dramatically, "Hesperus is
Hesperus" seems trivial, while "Hesperus is
Phosphorus" or "Phosphorus is Venus" seem to convey
valuable information. And yet, on referentialist principles, all three
identity statements express the same proposition.



Paradigmatically, according to Grice's theory, the input to the
hearer's reasoning about implicatures is what is said.
Referentialism would seem to imply that different ways of saying the
same thing should be conversationally equivalent. But this does not
seem correct. If Elwood says, "I can't reach the
salt," this has the implicature that he would appreciate someone
passing it to him. But what if he says, "Elwood can't
reach the salt"? The implicatures are not so clear. Elwood seems
to have flouted the maxim of quantity, in both its submaxims, giving
us information we don't need (the name of the person who
can't reach the salt), and denying us information we do need,
namely that the speaker is the person whose relation to the saltshaker
is at issue. Grice's maxims of manner allow the theory of
conversation to deal with information that depends on how something is
said, rather than only *what is said*; it seems these maxims
may have to be exploited beyond what Grice envisaged to explain how
co-referential names and indexicals can give rise to non-equivalent
implicatures, if we adopt the referentialist account of what is
said.


#### 2.2.3 Stalnaker on Context and Content



In his seminal article "Pragmatics" (1970) Stalnaker
proposed a conception of semantics and pragmatics that would allow the
tools and traditions of formal semantics to be extended to pragmatics.
The pragmatic phenomena he mainly had in mind are what we are calling
"near-side pragmatics," involving the way in which, in the
setting of natural language, contextual factors interact with
conventional meaning to determine what is said, or the proposition
expressed. Stalnaker uses his pragmatic theory to deal with issues
that might be thought to require a semantic explanation, such as the
informativeness of identity statements ("Hesperus is
Phosphorus") and the import of negative existentials
("Homer did not exist"); in doing so he saw himself as
continuing in a Gricean tradition: 



> 
> ... I think the general Gricean strategy of trying to reduce the
> burden on semantics by explaining as much of the phenomena as possible
> in terms of truisms about conversation as a rational activity remains
> as fruitful and promising as it was when he first proposed it.
> (Stalnaker 1999, 113.)
> 



Formal semantics, as Stalnaker sees it, can be conceived as the study
of propositions within a possible worlds framework. Artificial
languages are designed to fit the meanings they are to express, so the
connection between language and proposition should not be a tricky
issue. But with natural languages,



> 
> it is a semantical problem to specify the rules for matching up
> sentences of a natural language with the propositions that they
> express. In most cases...the rules will not match sentences
> directly with propositions, but will match sentences with propositions
> relative to features of the context in which the sentence is used.
> These contextual features are a part of the subject matter of
> pragmatics... (Stalnaker 1970/1999, 34.)
> 



**Presupposition, Common Ground and Context**



Like Kaplan, Stalnaker has a two-tiered picture: sentence meanings
provide a function from contexts to propositions; propositions
themselves are functions from worlds to truth-values. Stalnaker,
however, has a quite different picture of context, which he bases on
the concept of *presupposition*. Intuitions about what is said
are accompanied by intuitions about what is not said, but merely
presupposed. If Elwood says,


1. The Queen of England has several palaces



he does not *say* that there is a Queen of England, but he
*presupposes* that there is. And consider


2. Peter knows the sea is salty
3. It was James Madison that led America to defeat in the war of
1812
4. Bush regrets invading Iraq
5. Trump resumed cheating on his wife



In saying (2), Elwood would not say, but merely presuppose, that the
sea is salty. In saying (3) he would presuppose, but not say, that
someone led America to defeat in the War of 1812. In saying (4) Elwood
would presuppose that Bush invaded Iraq, and in (5) he would
presuppose that Trump had cheated on his wife, and then stopped doing
so for a period of time (possibly rather short).



Presupposition has been treated as a semantic phenomenon and as a
pragmatic phenomenon. Arguably, each of (1)-(5) and its corresponding
negation would have the same presupposition. This has led to the
semantic conception of presupposition as a non-trivial entailment that
is shared by a statement and its negation. Semantical approaches to
presupposition encounter some tricky problems, the most important of
which is "the projection problem." If presupposition is
semantic, then it seems the presuppositions of complex sentences
should be a function of the presuppositions of the simple sentences
that make them up, but it is at least not obvious that this is so.
Consider, for example,


6. The king has a son
7. The king's son is bald
8. If the king has a son, the king's son is bald



(6) presupposes that there is a king, (7) that there is a king and
that the king has a son. (8) contains both (6) and (7). It seems to
inherit the presupposition of (6) but not of (7); that is, (8)
presupposes that there is a king, but not that he has a son. A correct
theory of just how presuppositions are inherited from simple to
complex sentences would solve the projection problem, and doing so
seems to be required for a semantic account of presupposition. A
number of interesting theories have been put forward; it is not our
purpose to claim that they are or are not successful. (See Karttunen
1973, 1974; Karttunen and Peters 1979; Gazdar 1979; Soames 1989;
Burton-Roberts 1989a-b, 1999; Heim 1992; Horn 19995; Asher and
Lascarides 1998; Carston 1998, 1999a; Kamp 2001; Beaver 2002;
Schlenker 2010.)



Stalnaker recognizes semantic presupposition in the case of simple
sentences (1)-(5). And he thinks that semantic presuppositions are
also pragmatically presupposed; that is, if *P* is a semantic
presupposition of what the speaker says, then the speaker will in fact
take *P* for granted and take her audience to do so too; she
will treat *P* as part of the *common ground*:



> 
> 
> There is no conflict between the semantic and pragmatic concepts of
> presupposition; they are explications of related but different ideas.
> In general, any semantic presupposition of a proposition expressed in
> a given context will be a pragmatic presupposition of the people in
> the context, but the converse clearly does not hold. 
> 
> 
> 
> To presuppose a proposition in the pragmatic sense is to take its
> truth for granted, and to assume that others involved in the context
> do the same...
> 
> 
> 
> The set of all the presuppositions made by a person in a given context
> determines a class of possible worlds, the ones consistent with all
> the presuppositions. This class sets the boundaries of the linguistic
> situation. (Stalnaker 1970/1999, 38.)
> 
> 
> 



Stalnaker emphasizes that when we make assertions (the paradigmatic
use of language, conceived as a tool for exchanging information),
there is a natural division into what the speaker presupposes and what
the speaker says. If Elwood says, "The Queen of England has
charming grandchildren," he presupposes that there is a unique
queen of England, and says that her grandchildren are charming. In the
ordinary case, the presupposition would be shared by the
conversational participants, but not everyone would already know, or
believe, what Elwood says about her. The presuppositions that are
shared are the *common ground*, which is an important part of
the context of an utterance. Elwood's assertion is an attempt to
*add* to the common ground that additional content that the
queen's grandchildren are charming. Of course, someone may deny
that this is so, in which case it wouldn't become part of the
common ground. Nevertheless, we can conceptualize the meaning of a
sentence, or a central part of the meaning of a sentence, in terms of
the change a use of it attempts to make to the common ground.



**Propositional Concepts**



Unlike Kaplan, Stalnaker has a *homogeneous* theory of contexts
and contents. Both context and content can be conceived of as
propositions, or equivalently as sets of worlds. A context is a set of
worlds, that capture the *common ground* in a conversation, the
presuppositions that all of the participants share. The point of an
assertion is to change the common ground. An utterance token is
associated with a *propositional* concept, which characterizes
the context-change potential of an assertion.



> 
> A propositional concept is a function from possible worlds into
> propositions, or, equivalently, a function from an ordered pair of
> possible worlds into a truth-value. (Stalnaker 1978/199, 81.)
> 



The truth-value of a statement like "That man is sitting"
will depend on two issues: (i) who is being referred to as 'that
man'; (ii) who is sitting. The propositional concept
corresponding to this statement will yield the truth for any pair of
worlds *w*, *w*' such that there is an *x*
that is referred to as 'that man' in *w*, and
*x* is sitting in *w*'.



Suppose, for example, we are talking about Albert. The common ground
will include such things as that 'Albert' names a certain
person that attended Stanford last year, that this person was from
Bonn, and that he intended to return and teach in Germany. The common
ground leaves open whether he is, as we speak, in Germany or not. I
say, "Albert isn't in Germany, but in Switzerland, this
month." If no one objects, the common ground will change; the
worlds in which Albert is anywhere but in Switzerland will be
eliminated. The propositional concept of an utterance can be seen as
the effect it will have on the various contexts in which it might
occur. Which worlds my assertion adds or deletes from the common
ground will depend on who we are talking about (the reference of
'Albert') and which month it is when I speak, for example.
The proposition expressed by a statement, what is asserted, will be a
proposition that captures the change proposed for the context in which
it occurs.



Suppose now that you and I are talking, and not far in the distance
are Elwood and Ambrose. Elwood is clearly standing; it's not so
clear whether Ambrose is standing or sitting. I point to Ambrose and
say, "that man is sitting." Given that I am pointing to
Ambrose, my statement will be true only if he is sitting, and so
perhaps you change your beliefs accordingly; what was not part of the
common ground, that Ambrose was sitting, now becomes part of the
common ground.



Another possibility is that you think you see Ambrose at least as
clearly than I do, and it is not at all clear that I am right. So you
reject my proposal to modify the common ground, and say,
"Ambrose may not be sitting."



But there is a third possibility, too. Suppose you took me as pointing
to Elwood. But if I am pointing to Elwood, I am saying something
patently false, for it is clear that he is standing. To make sense of
my remark, the simplest thing to do is change your view of whom I am
pointing at: Ambrose rather than Elwood. Now the change is not in who
you think is sitting or not, but whom you think I am pointing to.
Given the propositional concept of the utterance "that man is
sitting", it works, in the paradigmatic case, to convey
information about who is sitting, and it also has the capacity, in a
different situation, to convey information about to whom I am
pointing.



The concept of a propositional concept allows Stalnaker to accommodate
the facts that, as we saw above, seemed to pose a problem for
referentialists.


## 3. Contemporary Pragmatic Theory



Most current pragmatic theorists are neo-Griceans in that they adopt
at least some version of his main three contributions: 


1. a fundamental distinction of what a speaker says and what she
implicates;
2. a set of rules or principles, derived from general principles of
rationality, cooperation and/or cognition, that guide, constrain or
govern human linguistic communication (there are differences among
neo-Griceans on the exact nature of these principles and of pragmatic
reasoning generally, as we shall see); and
3. a notion of communicative intention (called M(eaning)-intention by
Grice) whose fulfillment consists in being recognized by the
addressee.



Given these similarities, there are many differences. One important
dimension involves disciplines and methodology. Following Carston
(2005) there are at least three different general tendencies: those
who see pragmatics, much in Grice's vein, as a philosophical
project; those who concentrate on its interaction with grammar; and
those who see it as an empirical psychological theory of utterance
interpretation.



A second dimension has to do with the relative importance given to two
models of communication. One is the coding-decoding model of Locke and
Saussure, as developed in the twentieth century logic and philosophy
in compositional theories of meaning and truth. The other model, which
we owe mostly to Grice, also has Lockean roots, in that communication
of belief from speaker to hearer lies at its center. But the mechanism
of discovery is not decoding according to conventional rules, but
intention-recognition and discovery based on ampliative inference. The
two models are not inconsistent, and all theorists accept elements of
each. The issue is their relative centrality and importance in the
phenomenon of human communication with language.


### 3.1 Two models of Linguistic Communication



According to the coding model, communication consists in a sender and
a receiver sharing a common code or language and a channel, so that
the former encodes the message and sends it for the latter to decode
it. Communication is, following this picture, quite an easy matter. It
just amounts to knowledge of language and a safe channel -- i.e.,
without too much 'noise.' If sender and receiver share the
knowledge of the code and the message makes its way through the
channel the success of communication is guaranteed.



One of Grice's major contributions to the theory of
communication was provision of an alternative to the Locke-Saussure
model of communication as a coding and decoding of thoughts. One can
think of the alternative either as a supplement or a replacement for
the coding model.



Intentions and their recognition are at the heart of Grice's
alternative. Even if the interpreter's reasoning is guided by
the conversational principle or maxims, as Grice suggested,
intention-recognition is not basically a matter of following
conventional rules, but ampliative reasoning about what is going on in
other minds.



But how do the two models fit together? Is language mainly and
centrally a matter of deduction, of coding and decoding according to
the conventions of meaning, with a little intention-recognition around
the near and far edges to take care of ambiguity and implicature? Or
is communication mainly a matter of acting in ways that get
one's intentions recognized, with the conventions of language
being just a helpful resource for accomplishing this?



In the classical period, near-side pragmatics tended to be ignored,
and the Gricean model applied only to issues beyond saying; all of
this is consistent with the first picture. Many neo-Griceans still
adopt much of the first picture, and see the core of language as an
autonomous realm studied by semantics, in which the meanings of parts
compositionally determine the meanings of wholes, the fundamental
concept of meaning being the truth-conditions of sentences.
Grice's work is often used to bolster this picture; Gricean
considerations serve as a sort of shock-absorber, where apparent data
that are difficult to handle on the autonomous-semantics picture are
treated as merely apparent, resulting from mistaking implicatures for
'semantic content.' Recanati calls such theorists
'minimalists;' (see 3.4 below) while no one denies that
contextual facts and pragmatic reasoning are needed at the near side
of what is said, according to these theorists, there is
*minimal* intrusion of such considerations on autonomous
semantics.


### 3.2 Relevance Theory



According to relevance theory this is a mistake. Sperber and Wilson
(1986) see things the second way. Following Grice's model,
understanding what someone means by an utterance is a matter of
*inferring* the speaker's communicative intention: the
hearer uses all kinds of information available to get at what the
speaker intended to convey. The semantic information obtained by
decoding the sentence uttered is but one example of such information.
But much more information has to be used to infer what the speaker
meant -- that includes both what she said and what she implicated
-- by her utterance. So central is intention-recognition to
understanding language that the code model, with autonomous semantics
at its core, should largely be abandoned in favor of the inferential
model. One kind of pragmatic reasoning pervades language use,
near-side and far-side, and the areas in which the code model is
applicable are basically marginal. 



The need for supplementary information is too pervasive and too
important to be a matter of something specifically linguistic, as
might be suggested by Grice's conversational principle and
maxims. Sperber and Wilson see the fundamental mechanism of such
inferences as going well beyond language, and beyond humans. In terms
of Carston's distinctions, relevance theory departs from
Grice's philosophical project, and aims at an empirical
psychological theory of human cognition and communication. They see
the phenomenon they call 'relevance' as a psychological
phenomenon basic to the lives not only of humans but of all animals
with a cognitive repertoire sophisticated enough to have choices about
which environmental cues to attend to. Evolution shapes the phenomenon
of relevance; an animal's attention is drawn to environmental
cues that provide the most crucial information. Sounds of an
approaching cat grabs a bird's attention away from a worm;
parents are alert to the sounds of their baby's crying. The
phenomenon is extended through learning; the squeal of brakes grabs a
driver's attention away from a pretty sunset. And the cues can
be conventional; the dinner bell grabs the attention of the hungry
child. The phenomenon of relevance in language is another
manifestation of this very general phenomenon. 'Relevance'
in relevance theory, then, should not be taken to be just our ordinary
conception of relevance; nor should it be equated with the
'relevance' of Grice's maxim, although it is
connected to that and intended to provide a deepened understanding of
what underlies the maxim.



Relevance theory emphasizes that the rules of language leave all sorts
of issues open. Some words have too many meanings: ambiguity. Others
have too little meaning: 'he,' or 'that.'
Decoding alone won't determine which meaning the speaker is
using, or which object she intends to refer to with a pronoun. So even
before we get to what is said, communication involves intentions on
the part of the speaker that go beyond what she "codes-up"
into language, and inferences on the part of the hearer that go beyond
decoding. And of course when we consider what is conveyed beyond
saying, the coding model is even less adequate. In all of these ways
in which knowledge of convention falls short, relevance fills the
gap.



A second difference rooted in the psychological conception of
pragmatics is reliance on the representational theory of mind. The
tenets of relevance theory are couched in talk of processing
representations, rather than, and sometimes in addition to, the
ordinary terminology of philosophical psychology.



Thus, instead of Grice's cooperative principle and
conversational maxims, relevance theory postulates principles of
relevance, which stem from the applicability of the general phenomenon
of relevance to linguistic situations in the context of a
representational theory of mind. There are two fundamental
principles.


#### 3.2.1 The Principles of Relevance



Pragmatic relevance is a property of utterances as a particular case
of inputs to cognitive processes: 



> 
> An input is relevant to an individual when it connects with available
> contextual assumptions to yield POSITIVE COGNITIVE EFFECTS: for
> example, true contextual implications, or warranted strengthenings or
> revisions of existing assumptions. (Sperber & Wilson 2005, 7)
> 



The relevance of an input for an individual is a matter of degree. In
general, the greater those positive cognitive effects with the smaller
mental effort to get them, the greater the relevance of the input for
the individual. Sperber and Wilson conjecture that the cognitive
architecture of human beings tends to the maximization of relevance.
This is what their first principle of relevance states:



> 
> *First (cognitive) principle of relevance*: Human cognition is
> geared towards the maximization of relevance (that is, to the
> achievement of as many contextual (cognitive) effects as possible for
> as little processing effort as possible).
> 



This is the general cognitive principle that serves as background for
communication in general and linguistic communication in particular.
Applied to linguistic communication, this involves the following: For
a communicative act to be successful, the speaker needs the
addressee's attention; since everyone is geared towards the
maximization of relevance, the speaker should try to make her
utterance relevant enough to be worth the addressee's attention.
This leads us to the



> 
> *Second (communicative) principle of relevance*: Every act of
> ostensive communication (e.g. an utterance) communicates a presumption
> of its own optimal relevance.
> 



By 'ostensive' relevance theorists make reference to the
'overt' or 'public' nature of the
speaker's communicative intentions in acts of communication.
Communication will be successful (i.e., understanding will occur) when
the addressee recognizes those intentions. This process is mostly
inferential and it has costs. So, the addressee would not start the
inferential process without a presumption that it will report her some
benefits, that is, without a presumption that the input is not only
relevant, but as relevant as it can, *ceteris paribus*. Then,
when someone utters something with a communicative purpose, she does
it, according to relevance theory, with the presumption of optimal
relevance, which states that


1. The utterance is relevant enough to be worth processing.
2. It is the most relevant one compatible with the
communicator's abilities and preferences.


#### 3.2.2 Implicated Premises and Conclusions



Although the principles of relevance account for near-side and
far-side inferences, relevance theory acknowledges a fundamental
distinction. On the near side, ambiguities, references, and issues of
vagueness will be resolved so as to make the 'explicature'
-- the relevance theoretic replacement for 'what is
said,' or 'the proposition expressed' --
maximally relevant. A somewhat more complex sort of reasoning then
derives implicatures. But these processes are not sequential. The
'choice' of explicature will be affected by the need to
come to an understanding of everything that is communicated,
explicature and implicature, as maximally relevant.



The addressee's understanding process starts then when she
perceives an ostensive stimulus and stops when her expectations of
relevance are satisfied, that is, when she has the most relevant
hypothesis (the one with the most positive cognitive effects at the
least processing costs) about the speaker's communicative
intention. After decoding the sentence uttered and getting at the
proposition expressed, the hearer will built a 'context'
of 'implicated premises' or assumptions for getting the
cognitive positive effects that make the utterance relevant. Remember
that those effects can be the reinforcement or revision of those
assumptions but also conclusions obtained deducing then from the
proposition expressed plus the context of premises. This context
building will also be highly constrained by relevance, looking for as
many positive effects as possible with the fewer inferential steps as
possible. In addition, the hearer has to look for the contents or
assumptions the speaker ostensively intends her to consider.



Consider the following exchange between A and B:


1. Have you seen *The Da Vinci Code*?
2. I don't like action movies.



It is reasonable to think that in B's response has the following
implicatures, as implicated premise and conclusion, respectively: 


* *Premise*: That *The Da Vinci Code* is an action
movie.
* *Conclusion*: That B has not seen it and, maybe, does not
intend to see it.



A retrieves the premise that together with the content of B's
response allows her to deduce a conclusion that is reasonable to think
B intends her to make, given that it seems the most relevant (the one
with more cognitive positive effects -- as implicatures in this
case -- with low processing costs).



This is how relevance theory re-interprets the Gricean notion of
particularized conversational implicatures: they are treated as
implicated premises and conclusions, communicated beyond what the
speaker says. On the other hand, relevance theorists abandon the
category of generalized conversational implicatures. The phenomena
Grice took to be as generalized conversational implicatures belong on
the near side according to relevance theorists. They are not part of
what is implicated by the speaker in making her utterance, but part of
the explicature.



According to this view, pragmatics in general and the principle of
relevance in particular have a lot to say about what happens on the
near side of the explicature. It is probably fair to say that
relevance theorists are mainly responsible for contemporary pragmatics
focusing not only on what is conveyed beyond saying but also on saying
itself, and for the fact that, as we shall see below, contemporary
philosophical pragmatic theory tends to focus on the extent to which
pragmatics 'intrudes' upon the traditional turf of
semantics.


### 3.3 A Theory of Utterance-Type-Meaning



Together with Horn's (1984, 1989, 2004), Levinson's work
(2000) is a good representative of grammar-oriented pragmatics.
Levinson is only marginally a neo-Gricean. He is not committed to
Grice's fundamental two-fold division between what is said, on
the one hand, and implicatures, on the other -- he proposes a
third level of default or preferred interpretation. He does not
provide a theory of utterance comprehension based primarily on
recognition of communicative intentions, for default interpretations
are not concerned with that. However, he does assume conversational
principles and maxims, formulating a series of heuristics, inspired by
Grice's maxims, for a theory of Generalized Conversational
Implicatures (GCIs) that, as important as they were in Grice's
program, have been neglected by many post-Gricean authors.
Levinson's GCI theory is not a philosophical theory of human
communication, nor a psychological theory of utterance understanding,
but a partial theory of utterance-type meaning with its focus on
linguistics. As he puts it:



> 
> In the composite theory of meaning, the theory of GCIs plays just a
> small role in a general theory of communication... It is just to
> *linguistic* theory that GCIs have an unparalleled import.
> (Levinson 2000, pp. 21-22.)
> 



The two-layered view of utterance content consisting, according to
Levinson, of a level of encoded meaning (*sentence-meaning*)
and a level of inferential meaning (*speaker's or
utterance-(token)-meaning*), must be supplemented by a third
intermediate layer of *utterance-type-meaning* which is not
based "on direct computations on speaker-intentions but rather
on general expectations about how language is normally used" (p.
22).



These expectations are formulated by Levinson as a series of
heuristics, that have a clear connection with Grice's maxims of
quantity and manner:



> 
> *First (Q) Heuristic*: What isn't said, isn't
> (i.e., what you do not say is not the case)
> 



This is related to Grice's first maxim of quantity ("Make
your contribution as informative as required") and is held
responsible for the inference of so-called scalar implicatures, among
others. So from an utterance of "Some students came to the
party" it is inferable by default that not all the students
came. It is not part of the meaning of 'some,' yet, in
general -- by default from the utterance-type -- it is what
one would infer in absence of evidence to the contrary. In this case,
the heuristic has to be restricted to a set of alternates in a
'scale,' so that the use of one implicates the
non-applicability of the other.



> 
> *Second (I) Heuristic*: What is expressed simply is
> stereotypically exemplified
> 



This is related to Grice's second maxim of quantity ("Do
not make your contribution more informative than necessary"),
and is taken to be involved in cases of interpretation of conditionals
as bi-conditionals, the enrichment of conjunctions with the expression
of temporal and causal relations among the conjuncts,
'bridging' inferences, collective reading of plural noun
phrases, and so on.



> 
> *Third (M) Heuristic*: What is said in an abnormal way,
> isn't normal (i.e., marked message indicates marked situation)
> 



This heuristic is related to Grice's maxim of manner and,
specially, to the first submaxim ("Avoid obscurity of
expression") and the fourth ("Avoid prolixity"). If
according to the second heuristic an unmarked utterance gives rise to
a stereotypical interpretation, now we have that this interpretation
is overruled if a marked utterance is produced. One of the clearest
examples is double negation versus simple positive assertion. Compare
"It's possible the plane will be late" with
"It's not impossible that the plane will be
late."



When conflict among these three heuristics arise, Levinson argues that
these are resolved in the following way: *Q* defeats
*M*, and *M* defeats *I*.


### 3.4 Border Disputes: Literalists, Minimalists, Contextualists and Others



Contemporary philosophical approaches to pragmatics are often
classified by their view of the two models discussed in
 Section 3.1.
 'Literalists' think that semantics is basically
autonomous, with little 'pragmatic intrusion';
'contextualists' adopt the basic outlines of the Relevance
Theory view of the importance of pragmatics at every level, while
perhaps demurring on many of the details and the psychological
orientation.



Take, for example, an utterance of "It is raining" by John
now on the CSLI patio in a telephone conversation with Kepa, who is in
Donostia. John is talking about the weather in Stanford. Arguably,
what John says is *that it is raining in Stanford*. This is
what he intends for Kepa to understand, and it is the content of the
belief, formed by looking at the weather around him, that motivates
his utterance. Stanford, then, seems to be a constituent, part of the
subject matter, of John's remark. But how did it get there? It
seems that it is a matter of pragmatics; it is a fact about
John's intentions that makes his remark to be about Stanford,
and that suffices. This is an example of what Perry (1986) calls an
'unarticulated constituent,' and an instance of a more
general phenomenon we will call 'unarticulated
content.'



The same basic choice, about what to do with apparently unarticulated
content that seems to be part of what is said, presents itself in
connection with a number of other phenomena: 'enriched'
uses of logical operators and numerals ("Mary got married and
[*then*] had [*exactly*] three children"),
quantifier domain restriction ("Nobody [*in the class*]
was paying attention"), comparative adjectives ("John is
short [*for a football player*]"), and a long list of
phenomena reconsidered now as possibly being part of what is said, the
explicature or the content of the utterance, rather than part of what
is implicated.



Most contemporary theorists would acknowledge that in such cases one
might describe 'what is said' in terms of the
unarticulated content: John said that it was raining *at
Stanford*; the speaker said that Mary got married and
*then* had children, and so forth. And there is general
agreement that intuitions about 'what is said' cannot by
themselves carry much theoretical weight, and there is considerable
disagreement about theoretical interpretation of unarticulated
content.



Literalists argue that the important divide, traditionally marked by
'what is said,' should be maintained, although marked by
new terminology. Cappelen and Lepore's (2005) term is
'semantic content.' On the near side of semantic content
will be only the factors acknowledged by Grice: conventional meaning
of words and modes of composition; resolution of ambiguity (including,
perhaps, issues of standards of precision and vagueness), and
resolution of reference of indexicals, demonstratives and names. On
the far side are Gricean implicatures.



Among literalists, we may distinguish between minimalists and
'hidden indexical' theorists. Literalists, do not accept
any pragmatically determined element in utterance content that is not
triggered by grammar, i.e., by a particular context-sensitive element
in the sentence used. Minimalists try to keep context-sensitive
expressions to a minimum and hidden-indexicalists pose a
context-sensitive expression whenever is needed. The latter admit the
'unarticulated' content into the proposition literally
expressed by the utterance, but hold that it is not
'really' unarticulated, since below the surface grammar,
at some deeper level, say logical form, the sentence provide an
indexical to be resolved pragmatically (Stanley 2000; Stanley and
Szabo 2000).



Cappelen and Lepore are both literalists and minimalists. They use the
term 'semantic content' for propositions determined solely
by conventions of meaning, precisification, disambiguation and
reference fixing. They allow that semantic content, so conceived, is
often not what ordinary speakers would identify as 'what is
said'; but they take what is said to be a pragmatic concept, and
so do not see this as an objection to their scheme. The semantic
content of John's utterance above, for example, is something
like the proposition "Rain is occurring," a relatively
trivial proposition, that will be true if it is raining anywhere on
earth (or perhaps, anywhere in the universe). (See Cappelen and Lepore
(2007) and Perry (2007).) The triviality of John's remark,
literally interpreted, sets Kepa on the search of some relevant
proposition he may have meant to convey, and this proposition, that it
is raining in Palo Alto, is what satisfies our intuitive concept of
'what is said.' But that shows only that 'what is
said' is basically a pragmatic concept, that shouldn't be
used to delineate true semantic content. We need to change the sign
from 'what is said' to 'semantic content,'
rather than move the boundary to fit the sign. On the near side of
semantic content we find only conventional meaning, disambiguation,
and resolution of reference and vagueness. On the far side we find
implicatures, that contribute not only what is suggested, conveyed,
and the like, but even what is said, as ordinarily conceived.



Those over on the Contextualist side, in contrast, see the level
corresponding to Grice's 'what is said' as
determined not only by semantics, disambiguation and reference-fixing,
but also by a number of other pragmatic processes that
'intrude' on the near side and enrich semantic content.
Contextualists include relevance theorists and such philosophers as
Recanati (2004), Travis (1997), Korta and Perry (2006a, 2006b, 2007a,
2007b, 2008, 2011, 2013) and Neale (2004). Contemporary contextualists
do not insist on the term 'what is said,' but provide
other criteria for the boundary between the proposition more or less
directly expressed and implicatures. Recanati argues that this level
-- which he sometimes calls 'what is
said*max*' in contrast of the 'what is
said*min*' of minimalists -- should
consist of a proposition that is consciously available to the speaker
and the proposition he intends to express, and that any planned
implications should also be consciously accessible. Cappelen and
Lepore's proposition would not usually pass this test. In our
example, John would not be consciously aware of having expressed a
proposition that would be true if it was raining on Venus, nor would
he at any remotely conscious level have planned for Kepa to reason
from the triviality and irrelevance of the proposition that rain
occurs to the one he meant to convey, that it rains at Stanford.



In Korta and Perry's 'Critical Pragmatics' (2008,
2011, 2013), the concept of 'what is said' is replaced
with two concepts. The 'reflexive' or
'utterance-bound content' and the
'referential' or 'locutionary content' of an
utterance. The 'utterance-bound content' is its
truth-conditions, as determined by the conventional meanings of the
words used and modes of composition, and thus corresponds to the
'semantically determined content.' This content will not
be the proposition expressed, but rather a set of conditions on the
utterance and the proposition it expresses, with quantification over
all relevant factors not determined by meaning -- including
factors that resolve ambiguity and reference. At this level, then,
Critical Pragmatics is radically minimal. For example, an utterance
*u* of "Elwood touched that woman" will be true
(roughly) if and only if there is an *x* and *y* such
that the speaker of *u* refers to *x* with
'Elwood,' refers to *y* with 'that
woman,' and uses 'touches' with for some action A
permitted by the conventions of English, and at some time prior to the
time of *u, x A'ed y*. The condition on the utterance
given to the right of the 'if and only if' comprise the
reflexive content of the utterance. On the other hand, the referential
content of *u* will be the proposition that, say, Elwood put
his hands on Eloise, if the actual facts about *u* provide
Elwood, Eloise as the referents and putting one's hands on as
the relevant sense of 'touches.' Critical Pragmatics
emphasizes the speaker's plan, a hierarchy of intentions, as the
main source of the facts that supplement conventional meaning to get
us from reflexive to incremental meaning.



The second concept employed to do the traditional work of 'what
is said' is 'locutionary content.' The
*intended* locutionary content is basically the referential
content the speaker intends to express, given her conception of the
context -- that is, roughly, the speaker, time, place and whom
and what she points at. The locutionary content is fixed by the actual
contextual facts, so a speaker's intended locutionary content
may not be the locutionary content of the utterance she produces.



An intermediate position -- called 'syncretic' by
Recanati (2004) -- has been subtly defended by Kent Bach (1994,
1999a, 2001). Bach is on the literalist, minimalist side of the
spectrum with respect to semantic content (for which he continues to
use the term 'what is said.') But he agrees with
contextualists that unarticulated contents are not implicatures, and
are not triggered by the meaning of the sentence uttered. He
introduces an intermediate category between what is said, in his
minimalist sense, and implicatures, which he calls
'implicitures' --with 'ci' pronounced as
in 'implicit' -- to include these elements.


### 3.5 A Methodological Flaw of Linguistic Pragmatism?



Recently, the philosopher Michael Devitt (2013) raised an interesting
issue about an alleged methodological flaw of many, if not most,
approaches to pragmatics. The flaw consists in conflating the
metaphysics of meaning -- the study of *what constitutes*
the meaning of an utterance -- and the epistemology of meaning
-- the study of *how the hearer interprets* the meaning of
an utterance. In his words:



> 
> Consider the 'meaning-properties' of an utterance in as
> broad a sense as you like, cover all its 'semantic' and
> 'pragmatic' properties, in whatever preferred sense. So
> the properties we are concerned with include conventional properties,
> 'what is said', 'what is implicated', and so
> on. [footnote omitted] Now, what constitutes one of those properties
> is one thing, how the hearer discovers the property, another. The
> property is constituted by what the speaker does, by the conventions
> she participates in, the objects she has in mind, or messages she
> intentionally conveys. [footnote omitted] That is where we look for
> the 'metaphysics of meaning'. And what needs emphasizing
> is that none of these meaning-properties is constituted in any way at
> all by what the hearer does in trying to interpret what is said or
> meant (Devitt, 2013: 288).
> 



Devitt attributes the confusion between the metaphysics and the
epistemology of meaning to most contextualist proposals (or what he
calls *linguistic pragmatism*), such as Bezuidenhout (2002),
Capone (2012), Carston (2004), Crimmins and Perry (1989), Elugardo and
Stainton (2004), Green (1989), Korta and Perry (2008), Levinson
(2000), Parikh (2010), Recanati (2004), Sperber and Wilson
(1986/1995), Saul (2002), Stanley and Szabo (2000) and Taylor (2001).
The exceptions, on the other hand, would be Bach (1999a, 2005), Neale
(2004, 2016) and Fodor and Lepore (2004) (for a recent discussion, see
the exchange between Korta and Perry (2019a, 2019b) and Devitt (2019)
in the *Journal of Pragmatics*.)



Relevance theory, for example, certainly takes pragmatics to be the
study of the *comprehension processes* of the utterance on the
part of the hearer (Sperber and Wilson (1986/1995), Carston (2002),
Wilson and Sperber (2012)). And, as Devitt claims, the study of those
processes should not be confounded with the study of what constitutes
the pragmatic properties of an utterance. In this case, however, the
relevance-theoretic hearer-oriented perspective seems a matter of
deliberate choice rather than a confusion.



Following Neale (forthcoming), besides the distinction between the
metaphysics and the epistemology of meaning, we should also consider
*formatics*: the study of how the speaker forms the plan that
eventually causes the production of her utterance. It is reasonable to
be clear about these three approaches, because though different, they
are closely interconnected. The speaker's beliefs about the
hearer's capability of understanding in the circumstances of the
utterance may affect, and typically do affect, her formation of
communicative intentions, which, in turn, constrain what she says and
implicates. Some approaches combine the three perspectives, and being
explicit about their difference may be often welcome.



Contemporary pragmatics is a large, active, interdisciplinary field.
The work we have considered here merges into important work in logic,
computer science and other areas we have not been able to discuss.
Philosophers, the founders of the discipline, continue to play an
important role in this field. Philosophically oriented pragmatists (to
give an old term a new meaning) usually consider pragmatic issues with
an eye towards large issues in the philosophy of language and beyond.
But in the course of this, they provide detailed analyses and consider
a wide variety of cases that continue to provide ideas and inspiration
for pragmatists from other disciplines. There is formal and
computational pragmatics; theoretical and applied; clinical,
experimental pragmatics and even neuropragmatics; there is also
intercultural. Interlinguistic and intersociocultural pragmatics;
historical pragmatics and history of pragmatics. And this list, as the
whole entry, is not exhaustive.


## 4. Some Definitions of Pragmatics



Many of the definitions reproduced below contrast pragmatics with
semantics.



**Morris 1938**. Semantics deals with the relation of
signs to (...) objects which they may or do denote. Pragmatics
concerns the relation of signs to their interpreters.
  

By 'pragmatics' is designated the science of the relation
of signs to their interpreters. (...) Since most, if not all,
signs have as their interpreters living organisms, it is a
sufficiently accurate characterization of pragmatics to say that it
deals with the biotic aspects of semiosis, that is, with all the
psychological, biological, and sociological phenomena which occur in
the functioning of signs.



**Carnap 1942**. If in an investigation explicit
reference is made to the speaker, or, to put it in more general terms,
to the user of a language, then we assign it to the field of
pragmatics. (...) If we abstract from the user of the language
and analyze only the expressions and their designata, we are in the
field of semantics. And if, finally, we abstract from the designata
also and analyze only the relations between expressions, we are in
(logical) syntax.



**Bar-Hillel 1954**. I believe, therefore, that the
investigation of indexical languages and the erection of indexical
language-systems are urgent tasks for contemporary logicians. May I
add, for the sake of classificatory clarity, that the former task
belongs to *descriptive pragmatics* and the latter to *pure
pragmatics* (in one of the many senses of the expression)?



**Stalnaker 1970**. Syntax studies sentences, semantics
studies propositions. Pragmatics is the study of linguistic acts and
the contexts in which they are performed. There are two major types of
problems to be solved within pragmatics: first, to define interesting
types of speech acts and speech products; second, to characterize the
features of the speech context which help determine which proposition
is expressed by a given sentence. ... It is a semantic problem to
specify the rules for matching up sentences of a natural language with
the propositions that they express. In most cases, however, the rules
will not match sentences directly with propositions, but will match
sentences with propositions relative to features of the context in
which the sentence is used. Those contextual features are part of the
subject matter of pragmatics.



**Katz 1977**. [I] draw the theoretical line between
semantic interpretation and pragmatic interpretation by taking the
semantic component to properly represent only those aspects of the
meaning of the sentence that an ideal speaker-hearer of the language
would know in an anonymous letter situation,(...) [where there
is] no clue whatever about the motive, circumstances of transmission,
or any other factor relevant to understanding the sentence on the
basis of its context of utterance.



**Gazdar 1979**. PRAGMATICS = MEANING -- TRUTH
CONDITIONS. What we need in addition is some function that tells us
about the meaning of utterances. (...) The domain of this
pragmatic function is the set of utterances, which are pairs of
sentences and contexts, so that for each utterance, our function will
return as a value a new context: the context as changed by the
sentence uttered. (...) And we can treat the meaning of the
utterance as the difference between the original context and the
context arrived at by utterance of the sentence. [This applies to
only] a restricted subset of pragmatic aspects of meaning.



**Kempson 1988**. Semantics provides a complete account
of sentence meaning for the language, [by] recursively specifying the
truth conditions of the sentence of the language. ... Pragmatics
provides an account of how sentences are used in utterances to convey
information in context.



**Kaplan 1989**. The fact that a word or phrase has a
certain meaning clearly belongs to semantics. On the other hand, a
claim about the basis for ascribing a certain meaning to a word or
phrase does not belong to semantics... Perhaps, because it
relates to how the language is used, it should be categorized as part
of (...) *pragmatics* (...), or perhaps, because it
is a fact about semantics, as part of (...)
*Metasemantics*.



**Davis 1991**. Pragmatics will have as its domain
speakers' communicative intentions, the uses of language that
require such intentions, and the strategies that hearers employ to
determine what these intentions and acts are, so that they can
understand what the speaker intends to communicate.



***The Oxford Companion to Philosophy* (Fotion
1995)**. Pragmatics is the study of language which focuses
attention on the users and the context of language use rather than on
reference, truth, or grammar.



***The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy* (Lycan
1995)**. Pragmatics studies the use of language in context, and
the context-dependence of various aspects of linguistic
interpretation. (...) [Its branches include the theory of how]
one and the same sentence can express different meanings or
propositions from context to context, owing to ambiguity or
indexicality or both, (...) speech act theory, and the theory of
conversational implicature.



***The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy* (Davies
1995)**. The distinction between semantics and pragmatics is,
roughly, the distinction between the significance conventionally or
literally attached to words, and thence to whole sentences, and the
further significance that can be worked out, by more general
principles, using contextual information.



**Carston 1999**. The decoding process is performed by an
autonomous linguistic system, the parser or language perception
module. Having identified a particular acoustic stimulus as
linguistic, the system executes a series of deterministic grammatical
computations or mappings, resulting in an output representation, which
is the semantic representation, or logical form, of the sentence or
phrase employed in the utterance. (...) The second type of
cognitive process, the pragmatic inferential process (constrained and
guided by the communicative principle of relevance) integrates the
linguistic contribution with other readily accessible information in
order to reach a confirmed interpretive hypothesis concerning the
speaker's informative intention.



**Bach 2004**. Semantic information is information
encoded in what is uttered -- these are stable linguistic
features of the sentence -- together with any extralinguistic
information that provides (semantic) values to context-sensitive
expressions in what is uttered. Pragmatic information is
(extralinguistic) information that arises from an actual act of
utterance, and is relevant to the hearer's determination of what
the speaker is communicating. Whereas semantic information is encoded
in what is uttered, pragmatic information is generated by, or at least
made relevant by, the act of uttering it.


## 5. Glossary



**Ambiguity**
  

In general, an expression is ambiguous if it has more than one
meaning. When a word (e.g., 'bank') has multiple meanings,
we have lexical ambiguity. A sentence can be ambiguous even if none of
its words is ambiguous. Sometimes the ambiguity is considered
syntactic because the alternative meanings correspond to alternative
syntactic configurations (e.g., 'Mary saw John with a
telescope'). If there is only one syntactic configuration, the
ambiguity is structural (e.g., 'Every man admires a
woman'). It is not always clear what kind ambiguity is at stake,
or even if there is any ambiguity at all (Grice's theory of
implicatures and his *Ockham's modified razor* had a
great impact on this issue). In any case, ambiguity -- the
existence of several meanings for an expression -- should be
distinguished from *nambiguity* (the existence of many
different bearers of a proper name), from vagueness (meanings with
unclear boundaries of application), and underdetermination (failure to
fully specify a meaning). It is usually assumed that resolving
ambiguity is a pragmatic process, involving determining which meaning
the speaker intends to be exploiting, although ambiguity itself is a
semantic condition.



**Attitude report**
  

'Propositional attitude' is Bertrand Russell's term
for designating mental states with propositional content, conceived as
relations between an agent and a proposition. Propositional attitude
verbs include 'believes,' 'wants,'
'desires,' 'intends' or 'knows'
and many others -- basically, the core of our vocabulary for
describing minds and language.



Sentences like 'Kepler thought that the Earth was
spherical' embed other sentences -- 'the earth was
spherical' -- in *oblique* (or *opaque* or
*intensional* (with an 's')) contexts. Oblique
contexts are not truth-functional. Substituting other true sentences
for 'the earth was spherical' will not necessarily
preserve truth. Moreover, even substituting co-designative terms for
'the earth' may not preserve truth. Kepler did not, one
supposes, think that Frege's favorite planet was spherical
(assuming the earth was Frege's favorite planet). 



According to Frege, in such contexts the usual sense of the sentence,
the 'Gedanke' or proposition expressed, becomes the
reference. Since Frege's "Uber Sinn und
Bedeutung" (1892) and Russell's "On Denoting"
(1905) the study of reports of these attitudes has been one of the
central topics of the philosophy of language, semantics and
pragmatics.



**Character/Content**
  

Since Kaplan's work on indexicals and demonstratives, (Kaplan
1989) it is commonplace to distinguish between the character of an
expression and the content of an utterance of an expression. For
example, the character of the word 'I' in English
doesn't change from context to context, although the content
does. Knowing the character of a sentence like 'I am a
philosopher' doesn't imply knowing the content of a
particular utterance of that sentence; for the latter, you need to
know the 'semantic' context of the utterance. Character is
a property of linguistic expressions (types); content is a property of
utterances --sentences-in-context; tokenings of them.



**Context**
  

'Context' is an all-pervasive term in pragmatics. For some
authors 'context' is the defining concept of pragmatics.
But many, perhaps too many, different concepts are included under this
term.



In Linguistics, 'context' commonly means the previous and
subsequent linguistic material in a given text. In Kaplan's
scheme, the context is objective, it comprises the actual basic facts
about an utterance: the speaker, time, place, and possible world in
which it occurs. In Stalnaker's scheme, context is basically
subjective: a matter of common ground: that is, shared beliefs that
serve as common presuppositions for the interpretation of assertions.
Often the term is used for anything in the indefinitely large
surrounding of an utterance, from the intentions of the speaker to the
previous topics of conversation to the objects discernible in the
environment.



Here are a number of distinctions that have been made with respect to
the concept(s) of context that the reader may find helpful. The list
is not intended to be exhaustive, mutually exclusive, or to represent
a single coherent view of pragmatic phenomena.



*Linguistic context versus extralinguistic context*
  

Considering the context of an utterance, one of the most intuitive
distinctions is between the context as consisting of its previous and
subsequent utterances -- the linguistic contexts -- and any
other extra-linguistic circumstance surrounding the utterance. In the
case of ellipsis and anaphoric (and cataphoric) pronouns the
designation is determined, or at least constrained, by the linguistic
context of the utterance, while the designation of deictic
demonstratives is fixed by contextual extralinguistic facts.



*Narrow versus broad*
  

Narrow context is usually understood as the list of parameters for
basic indexicals, parameters that correspond to basic facts about the
utterance. Speaker, place and time are on almost everyone's
list, as required for the interpretation of 'I,'
'here,' 'now' and tense. Kaplan adds the
possible world, for the interpretation of 'actual.'
Arguably, every utterance occurs in a world, at a time, in a place,
and with a speaker. 



In contrast, wide or broad context is understood as all other kinds of
information, in particular, information relative to the
speaker's communicative intention, used for the interpretation
of 'pragmatic aspects' of the utterance. In Bach's
words:
  





> 
> Wide context concerns any contextual information relevant to
> determining the speaker's intention and to the successful and
> felicitous performance of the speech act... Narrow context
> concerns information specifically relevant to determining the semantic
> values of [indexicals]... (Bach 1999a)
> 



Bach goes on to say,



> 
> Narrow context is semantic, wide context pragmatic.
> 



But on this there would be some disagreement, as many would hold that
information about the speaker's intentions, and perhaps also
about causal and informational chains, ongoing topics of
conversations, and much else, are needed for semantics.



*Epistemic versus doxastic*
  

It is sometimes assumed, particularly by writers with a psychological
orientation, that, together with speaker's intentions, it is
speaker's beliefs what determine the content of expressions in
her utterance, with the issue of the truth (or falsity) of her beliefs
having no relevance. So, belief rather than knowledge is the relevant
concept to characterize context. According to this view, there would
not be a significant difference between 'intending to say'
and 'saying,' which goes about some truths of intentions
in general: one usual way of failing to perform an action comes from
the falsity of some agent's belief. This is related to another
possible distinction between objective and subjective contexts.



*Objective versus subjective*
  

There are a number of cases, however, in which the speaker's
beliefs, even if shared by everyone in the conversation, do not seem
to determine content. Suppose, for example, that Elwood's hero
worship of John Searle has reached such a point that he now takes
himself to be John Searle. He introduces himself to the new class of
Stanford graduate students by saying, "I'm John Searle,
from across the Bay." It seems that even if he and everyone in
the conversation believes he is Searle, what he has said is the
falsehood that Elwood is John Searle. Or, suppose a group of golfers
is standing on the small portion of the Stanford golf course that juts
into San Mateo County, but none of them realize it. "The county
seat of this county is San Jose," one of them says, for some
reason or other. He believes he has informed them of the truth that
the county seat of Santa Clara County is San Jose, and in fact the
other members of the foursome learn this fact from what he says.
Nevertheless, many would argue, what he said was false, and only
fortuitous ignorance led his partners to learn a truth from the
falsehood he uttered.



*Pre-semantic context*
  

Pre-semantic context provides information for identifying the
utterance: which words in which language with which syntactic
structure, and with which meanings are being used.



*Semantic context*
  

Semantic context comprises those contextual features that determine or
partly determine the content of context-sensitive expressions. This is
the case of pronouns, whose linguistic meanings do more or less
strictly constrain but do not determine their designata. Their
meanings direct us to the context (linguistic context, in cases of
anaphoric co-designation; extra-linguistic context in cases of
indexicals and deictic uses of demonstratives) to look for the
designation of the pronoun. But there are more context-sensitive
expressions than indexical, deictic and anaphoric pronouns. Sentence
mood, for instance, is an indicator of illocutionary point, but it
does not determine the precise illocutionary force of an utterance
without the help of contextual factors. The contribution to
utterance-content of some particles like 'but' (that,
according to Grice, produce 'conventional implicatures) are
another case in point.



*Post-semantic context*
  

Third, there is (or may be) what Perry (2001) calls post-semantic
context. This comprises facts that provide *unarticulated
content*. For example, the fact that a conversation is about Palo
Alto may determine, perhaps together with speaker intentions, that the
statement "It is raining," has the content that it is
raining in Palo Alto. Arguably, such contextual contributions are not
triggered by the meaning-rules of the words used, but more global
considerations. The fact that we usually are talking about rain in a
particular place has to do with the nature of rain and the way humans
are concerned with it and conceptualize the phenomena, rather than the
syntax of 'rain.'



*(Far-side) Pragmatic Context*
  

This comprises those contextual factors needed to get at (calculate,
infer) what is communicated or done *in* and *by* saying
what one says. This importantly concerns the speaker's
intentions regarding indirect speech acts, implicatures, and
non-literal contents. It may also include institutional facts and
indeed, all sorts of other things relevant to the effects of the
utterance.



**Communicative intention**
  

Communicative intention is what characterizes, an action as
communicative. Following Grice's definition of
M(eaning)-intention, it is widely agreed that communicative intentions
have three particular properties: (i) it is *perlocutionary*,
that is, it is an intention that seeks a mental effect (certain
belief(s) or intention(s)) on the part of the addressee; (ii) it is
overt, that is, the speaker wants the addressee to recognize her
communicative intention; and (iii) the satisfaction of a communicative
intention consists precisely in its recognition by the addressee.
Communicative intentions need not be carried out by linguistic means
(see Clark 2003). In human linguistic communication planning and
inference processes have a role at least as important as coding and
decoding processes. The speaker plans her speech act according to her
communicative intention; the addressee uses, among other sources, the
information decoded to infer (recognize) the speaker's
communicative intention.



**Implicature (conventional, conversational, particularized,
generalized)**
  

Grice distinguished what the speaker says from what she implicates by
an utterance. The category of implicature refers to what the speaker
suggests, implies or communicates beyond what she says. Among
implicatures he made a further distinction between conventional,
generated by the conventional meaning of certain words, and
non-conventional ones. Within non-conventional implicatures, he
distinguished between conversational, affected, among other factors,
by conversational principles and maxims, and non-conversational. And
finally, among conversational implicatures between particularized,
depending on particular features of contexts, and generalized ones.
Grice pointed out that conversational implicatures have the following
properties: (i) they are calculable, that is, inferable from, among
other things, the cooperative principle and the conversational maxims;
(ii) they are cancelable either explicitly (adding something like
"but I did not meant that") or contextually, by changing
the context; and (iii) except those implicatures based on the maxims
of manner, they are non-detachable, i.e., there is no way of saying
the same thing that would not carry the implicature. The last two
features, cancelability and non-detachability are known as the
'tests' for the presence of an alleged implicature.



**Implicit/explicit meaning**
  

In the traditional Gricean picture, 'explicit meaning'
corresponds to the sentence's conventional meaning; or to the
meaning obtained by the combination of conventional meaning and those
contextual aspects required by the conventional meaning; in other
words, to the result of sentence conventional
meaning+disambiguation+reference fixing, i.e., *what is said*.
The remaining of utterance meaning, in particular presuppositions and
implicatures, would be regarded as implicit meaning within the Gricean
picture. Grice's categories of conventional implicature and
generalized conventional implicatures, however, pose problems to the
distinction between the explicit and the implicit. After Grice, the
limits between them are not very clear yet, despite relevance
theorists's notion of 'explicature' or Bach's
'impliciture.'



**Indexical**
  

To determine the reference of an indexical expression (that is, to
determine what a speaker is referring to by the utterance of an
indexical expression), the interpreter must resort to context. This is
the most prominent property of indexical expressions: without varying
their meaning, they can change their content from context to context.
Paradigmatic indexical expressions are personal pronouns
('I,' 'you,' 'she'...),
demonstratives ('this,' 'that'), time and
place adverbs ('here,' 'there,'
'now,' 'yesterday,'
'tomorrow'...). But indexicality is a more general
phenomenon: verb tense and aspect point to context for determining the
relevant temporal point or interval. The semantic information of some
indexical expression leaves little room for doubts about what to look
for in context: 'I' refers to the speaker,
'here' refers to the place the speaker is in,
'tomorrow' to the day starting at midnight of the day of
utterance. These are called 'pure' or
'automatic' indexicals, in contrast to
'discretionary' indexicals, whose semantic information
does not determine the referent, and it is necessary to appeal to
speaker's intentions to do so (Perry 2001). Indexical
expressions have been called 'deictic,' 'egocentric
particulars' and 'token-reflexive expressions.'



**Intention**
  

It is a kind of mental state, like belief and desire, for example.
From the point of view of the mental cause theory of action,
intentions cause actions.



Being caused by an intention distinguishes movements (or absences of
movement) which are actions from mere events, and so, among bodily
movements, intentional actions from mere reflexes. The object of
intention can be represented as a proposition representing the
movements (she moved her arm on purpose), or as various results
expected or hoped for as a result of the movement (she checkmated her
opponent, and made him cry, on purpose).



**Intentionality**
  

The word 'intention' is relatively unambiguous outside of
philosophy. But philosophers use the word 'intention' and
especially the adjective 'intentional' to refer to a
feature of a class of mental states that includes but is not limited
to intentions ordinarily understood. This is the property of being
*about* or *directed* at objects, including not only
real concrete objects, but also abstract and fictional objects,
properties, and states of affairs. Thus *believing* that it is
raining, *hoping* to get a computer for Christmas, *talking
about* Sherlock Holmes, *figuring out* the square root of
six hundred and twenty five, are all intentional states and
activities, as is *intending* to bake a cake. It is often
assumed that minds, mental states, have intrinsic intentionality, and
that utterances and sentences have only intentionality in a derived
sense: they have it from the intentionality of the mental state they
express. 



Intentionality (with a 't') should not be confused with
**intensionality** (with an 's'). The latter
is another technical expression of logic and philosophy; intensions
are opposed to extensions. Russell's example is that the
intension of 'featherless biped that is not a plucked
chicken' is quite different than the intension of 'human
being,' although their extensions are (perhaps) the same.
Extensions include classes, sets, and functions considered as sets of
ordered pairs and truth-values. Intensions are meaning, rules,
properties, functions as ordinarily conceived, and propositions. In
*possible-worlds semantics* intensions are often identified
with sets of possible worlds or functions that take possible worlds as
arguments. A property, for example, might be identified with a
function from worlds to set of objects (those that have the property
in the world), and a proposition with a set of worlds (those in which
it is true). Whether such an identification is meant as a reduction or
explanation of intensions as extensions, or simply as a way of
modeling intensions as extensions, varies from theorist to
theorist.



**Literal/non-literal**
  

Some take this to be a distinction about word meaning. According to
this view, beyond their conventional or literal meaning, words can
have figurative or non-literal meanings: metaphoric, ironic, metonymic
meanings. After the rise of pragmatic studies, the distinction is
considered mostly to be one at the speaker's meaning level. When
the speaker's meaning is closed to the conventional meaning of
the sentence uttered the speaker is said to be speaking literally.
When it departs from conventional meaning is considered non-literal.
Of course, the distinction is not clear cut: how much must the
speaker's meaning depart from conventional meaning to be
considered as non-literal? Some authors prefer to talk about a
continuum rather than a two-sided distinction.



**Locutionary, illocutionary, perlocutionary**
  

In terms of Austin's speech act theory these are three main
levels to be distinguished in a speech act. Every speech act is an act
of saying something. This is the *locutionary* level. Within it
Austin distinguished three more: the *phonetic act* (the act of
producing some sounds), the *phatic* act (the act of uttering
some words pertaining to the vocabulary of a certain language
organized according to the rules of its grammar), and the
*rhetic* act (the act of using those words with a certain sense
and reference). But *in* saying something one *does*
something. This is the *illocutionary level*. And, finally,
*by* saying something one gets some (intended or unintended)
effects in the audience. This is the *perlocutionary* level.
Searle casts doubt on the distinction between locutionary and
illocutionary acts, not seeing the necessity of the former category.
As it has developed, speech act theory has been almost entirely
devoted to study of the illocutionary level.



**Performative utterance**
  

Austin contrasted between statements, traditionally considered as the
only utterances with any philosophical importance, with performative
utterances that would not be considered as being true or false, and
rather than merely saying something are better considered as acts of
*doing* something. He further distinguished between explicit
and implicit performative utterances. The first are those whose main
verb, called 'performative verb,' makes explicit the
particular act that the speaker is performing in producing the
utterance. These verbs usually present a canonical form: (in English)
the first person singular in the present active, or the second person
of the passive. Not all implicit performative utterances can be made
explicit through a performative utterance. Following Austin's
discussion, all utterances end up being performative, so that the
contrast between them and statements seems to make no sense any more.
The concept of performative utterance was supplanted in the
development of speech act theory by the concept of speech act.



**Sentence**
  

It is traditionally defined as the (grammatical) complex expression
capable of expressing a complete thought or proposition. This
definition is questioned by the assumption that thoughts or
propositions are expressed by utterances (or speakers). According to
the contextualist thesis, no sentence expresses a complete
(truth-evaluable) proposition; i.e., there are no
'eternal' sentences. From the viewpoint of pragmatics,
sentences can be conceived as utterance-types, resulted from
abstracting all elements except the linguistic expressions used. The
issue of what counts as a complete (grammatical) sentence opposed to a
sub-sentential complex expression pertains to syntax, rather than to
semantics or pragmatics.



**Speech act**
  

Speech acts are communicative acts performed through the oral or
written use of language. Within speech acts, Austin distinguished
among locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary levels, but speech
act theory has been devoted almost exclusively to the illocutionary
level, so that 'speech act' and 'illocutionary
act' are in practice synonymous terms. An elementary speech act
consists of a propositional content and an illocutionary force.
Illocutionary force concerns the act the speaker intends to do in
performing the speech act. All illocutionary forces, in Searle's
version of speech act theory, can be grouped into five classes,
according to their basic intention or illocutionary point: assertives,
commissives, directives, declaratives and expressives. The
illocutionary force and the propositional content of a speech act
determine its conditions of success and satisfaction.



**Type-Token**
  

'Alabama': how many letters does this word have? If we
count letter tokens, the answer is 7. If we count letter types, the
answer could be 4 ('a,' 'l,' 'b,'
'm') or 5 (if we distinguish between capital and small
letters). If you say "You are wrong" to me, and I say
"You are wrong" to you, we have produced different tokens
of the same type. Usually tokens are conceived as marks on paper, or
sounds that travel through space.



Tokens can be typed in various ways. We might consider "Life is
fun" and "*Life is fun*" as two tokens of the
same type, if fonts are not relevant, or different if they are. In
semantics and pragmatics, the default way of typing tokens is by the
syntax and semantics of the phrases produced according to the language
used.



At the time the distinction was made by Peirce (1931-58, sec.
4.537), it was pretty straightforward, with just spoken and written
tokens to worry about. If I mail you a letter, you see the same token
I produced. If I speak to you, you hear the same token I produced.



Things are more complicated now. Suppose I send you an email. It seems
I produce one token on my screen and another of the same type appears
on your screen, with the same content, at least in ordinary cases.
Similarly if I send you a recording. The extension of type/token
distinction to modern technology is not a settled issue, however.



So conceived, token are objects, and written tokens, at least, can be
re-used. A department might have a reusable note, "I am at
lunch," that various faculty can put on their doors at different
times. The same token is used; the type is the same, but the content
changes from door to door and time to time.



Utterances are usually taken to be intentional acts, and not the
tokens produced. But some thinkers take utterances to simply be
tokens. More commonly those who want to emphasize the importance of
tokens refer to utterances conceived as acts, as a *tokening*;
a number of writers use this terminology. 



**Utterance**
  

Conceived as acts, utterances have properties that are crucial to
pragmatics. An utterance is most often taken to be a linguistic action
performed by a certain speaker in a certain place at a certain moment.
It has, then, the ontological status of actions: each utterance is a
unique historical event; it is a token, not a type; an utterance made
by one speaker cannot be made by another one; an utterance made here
and now cannot be made there later. In Linguistics,
'utterance' is often used for the action of pronouncing
orally a sentence, but philosophers tend to also include writing,
signing, and other modes of language use, and for the action of using
a sub-sentential expression. It is the view of many but not all
pragmatists that the primary bearers of truth-conditional contents are
utterances, not sentences; or, even better, that truth-conditional
contents or propositions are expressed by the speakers who utter
sentences, not by the sentences themselves. Utterances of declarative
sentences are called 'statements.'