Pursuing Meaning by Emma Borg

Author:Emma Borg
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2014-08-28T16:00:00+00:00

If this is right then it gives us our first minimalist solution to the problem posed by demonstratives and other apparently intention-sensitive terms.

However, on reflection, it is not so clear that the allegation of Humpty-Dumpty-ism really does hold against the intentionalist. For although it may seem right that speaker intentions unconstrained cannot underpin communicative acts of reference, it remains open to the intentionalist to constrain the set of intentions she is interested in in some way (for instance, requiring referential intentions to be communicative intentions).10Alternatively, an intentionalist might accept that a speaker who uses a demonstrative in a way which cannot be recovered by her audience (e.g. using ‘that’ with the intention of referring to an object when she knows that there are no contextual cues available to help her audience ascertain this intention) is guaranteed to fail in any communicative endeavour she has. However, the intentionalist may take this as a failing at the level of communication which leaves the level of meaning untouched: though she employs a linguistic expression whose meaning is beyond the grasp of her audience (and thus she fails in Gricean respects as a cooperative speaker), nevertheless this doesn’t stop the expression having the literal meaning that it does.11

(p.119) So, the motivation for conventionalism may be thought somewhat suspect. Furthermore, the account itself faces an apparently serious objection, for it seems that the very notions it appeals to to replace speaker intentions themselves require intentional input. For instance, what makes a given physical movement a pointing at a dog (rather than a pointing at a dog's collar, or colour, or place, etc) is not merely features of the movement's physical orientation but is a matter of what the agent intended to pick out with her gesture. Conventionalism thus seems to postpone, rather than genuinely eliminate, the appeal to speaker intentions in issues of reference determination. As Recanati 2004: 57 writes:

It is generally assumed… that the demonstrative refers to the object which happens to be demonstrated or which happens to be the most salient, in the context to hand. But the notions of ‘demonstration’ and ‘salience’ are pragmatic notions in disguise… Ultimately, a demonstrative refers to what the speaker who uses it refers to by using it.12

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.