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On the Social Practice of Indirect Reports

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The Pragmatics of Indirect Reports

Part of the book series: Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology ((PEPRPHPS,volume 8))

Abstract

This chapter deals with the social practice of indirect reports and treats them as cases of language games. It proposes a number of principles like the following:

Paraphrasis/Form Principle

The that-clause embedded in the verb ‘say’ is a paraphrasis of what Y said, and meets the following constraints: should Y hear what X said he (Y) had said, he would not take issue with it, as to content, but would approve of it as a fair paraphrasis of his original utterance. Furthermore, he would not object to vocalizing the assertion made out of the words following the complementizer ‘that’ on account of its form/style.

The upshot of the chapter is that opacity in indirect reports is the result of applying pragmatic principles.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Also see the discussion in Harnish (2000).

  2. 2.

    A piece of bodily behaviour.

  3. 3.

    It is not unusual to say what one is going to say on a certain occasion. In this case the event reported e’ is subsequent to the reporting.

  4. 4.

    Wittgenstein alerts us to the unpredictability of perlocutionary effects by the surprising example of a person who reads aloud to get someone to get asleep.

  5. 5.

    Here the term ‘pragmatic’ is used as derived from ‘Pragmatism’, and qualifies an approach largely resulting from considerations of means/end reasonings.

  6. 6.

    Burge’s (1986) more philosophical position that an extra argument needs to be posited for the reporter also seems to point to there being more than one voice in this discourse.

  7. 7.

    This position is somewhat reminiscent of Seymour’s (1994) treatment of indirect reports, in which reference to a translation of the reported sentence is explicitly incorporated in the semantics of in direct reports.

  8. 8.

    I used the term ‘strongly perspectived NPs’ because, following Barwise & Perry, we have seen (1981) that weakly perspectived NPs are in order in the that-clause of indirect reports or attitude reports in order to represent the speaker’s perspective.

  9. 9.

    Richard (2013) would say that pragmatics provides a function from the proposition/sentence uttered by the reporter and the sentence used in speech by the original speaker.

  10. 10.

    In fact, some (e.g. Jaszczolt, p.c.) argue that verbs of saying or ‘verba dicendi’ are not verbs of propositional attitude.

  11. 11.

    It is clear from the discussion that Habermas aims to reconcile Brentano’s notion of intentionality (thoughts are intentional in that they are directed towards objects and contents) with a teleological notion of intentionality.

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  1. University of Messina, Barcellona PG ME, Italy

    Alessandro Capone

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Capone, A. (2016). On the Social Practice of Indirect Reports. In: The Pragmatics of Indirect Reports . Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 8. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41078-4_2

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