Abstract
In the realm of meaning, what territory belongs to pragmatics, and what to semantics? The paper defends the primacy of semantics; it is semanticist rather than pragmaticist. The vehicle of content is primarily semantic, and is run by its ‘semantic engine’ so to speak. But what about problematic examples? Some authors proposes an extreme pan-semanticist answer: their semantic content is complete, since it relies on the convention pointing to what speaker “has in mind” (in Capone, 2013, p. 89). The semantic vehicle is complete, pragmatics offers just lining and paint. The opposite extreme is Bach’s proposal that semantics encompasses only the “skeleton”, often not truth-conditional.
The present paper defends an intermediate semanticist position: semantic content provides the guidance to truth-conditions, the rest is pragmatics. Call this “the guidance view”. In terms of vehicle metaphor, semantic content provides and directs the main force, it is the powertrain of the vehicle. The paper assumes that anaphora is semantic, shows that anaphora guides the hearer in determining the truth-conditional content, and argues that most problematic cases are anaphora-like: this concludes the defense of our guidance view.
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Notes
- 1.
Many of them are listed and brilliantly discussed by Kent Bach in his pioneering (Bach 1994).
- 2.
- 3.
Let me quote a footnote offered by Devitt at this point: Fn 3 Some prefer to say that the reference is determined by what the speaker “intends to refer to”. This can be just a harmless difference but it may not be. Having x in mind in using the term simply requires that the part of the thought that causes that use refers to x. In contrast, for a speaker literally to intend to refer to x, given that intentions are propositional attitudes, seems to require that she entertain a proposition containing the concept of reference. So she can’t refer without thinking about reference! This would be far too intellectualized a picture of referring. Uttering and referring are intentional actions, of course, but it seems better to avoid talking of intentions when describing them (Devitt 2013d, p. 89).
- 4.
Charles Travis is the most creative active author in this tradition (see, for instance Travis 2006).
- 5.
These are clearly cases of procedural knowledge. Now, Bezuidenhout (2004) argues that procedural knowledge is pragmatic; I disagree but I have to leave it to another occasion.
- 6.
The participants were explicitly instructed to choose the paraphrase that best reflected what they thought represented the speaker’s “said meaning”, apart from whatever they were shown earlier about what various linguists and philosophers have often claimed about “said” meaning (Gibbs and Moise 1997, p. 64).
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Miscevic, N. (2021). The Primacy of Semantics and How to Understand It. In: Macagno, F., Capone, A. (eds) Inquiries in Philosophical Pragmatics. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 27. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-56437-7_4
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