Abstract
Stalnaker’s Context deploys the core machinery of common ground, possible worlds, and epistemic accessibility to mount a powerful case for the ‘autonomy of pragmatics’: the utility of theorizing about discourse function independently of specific linguistic mechanisms. Illocutionary force lies at the peripherybetween pragmatics—as the rational, non-conventional dynamics of context change—and semantics—as a conventional compositional mechanism for determining truth-conditional contents—in an interesting way. I argue that the conventionalization of illocutionary force, most notably in assertion, has important crosscontextual consequences that are not fully captured by a specification of dynamic effects on common ground. More generally, I suggest that Stalnaker’s purely informational, propositional analysis of both semantic content and dynamic effects distorts our understanding of the function of language, especially of the real-world commitments and consequences engendered by robustly ‘expressive’ language like slurs, honorifics, and thick terms.
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Notes
Pinker et al. (2008). Indeed, I argue (Camp forthcoming a) that speakers can mean and successfully communicate contents without adding them to the common ground.
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Camp, E. Pragmatic force in semantic context. Philos Stud 174, 1617–1627 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0781-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-016-0781-5