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Overlooking Conventions pp 31–55Cite as

The Semantics-Pragmatics Distinction

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Part of the book series: Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology ((PEPRPHPS,volume 29))

Abstract

I argue that the theoretical basis we need for distinctions in the semantics-pragmatics dispute is to be found by noting that languages are representational systems of symbols that scientists attribute to species to explain their communicative behaviors. We then have a powerful theoretical interest in distinguishing, (a), the representational properties of an utterance that arise simply from the speaker’s exploitation of a linguistic system from, (b), any other properties that may constitute the speaker’s “message”. I call the former properties “what-is-said” and “semantic”, the latter, “what is meant but not said” and “pragmatic. From this theoretical basis I argue that what-is-said is constituted by properties arising from (i) linguistic conventions, (ii) disambiguations, and (iii) reference fixings. Setting aside novel uses of language, I then frame the semantics-pragmatics dispute as one between these two doctrines. According to SEM, what-is-said (in my sense) is typically the truth conditional speaker-meaning (content) of an utterance. According to PRAG, in contrast, the truth conditional speaker-meaning (content) of an utterance, the message conveyed, is seldom, perhaps never, constituted solely by what-is-said (in my sense). I foreshadow the argument in Chaps. 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12 that the striking examples produced by Linguistic Pragmatists can be accommodated by SEM. Evidence for this can be found in the regular use of a certain form with a certain speaker meaning, a regularity that is best explained by supposing that there is a linguistic, probably conventional, rule of so using the expression.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Earlier versions of some of the points in this chapter can be found in my “What makes a property ‘semantic’?” (2013c) and my Ignorance of language (2006b).

  2. 2.

    And it is worth noting that sometimes we are confident that an animal has a language because we have taught it one; think of some dolphins and primates that have been taught surprisingly complex languages.

  3. 3.

    For more on this issue see Devitt 2006c (pp. 585–6) responding to Smith 2006 (p. 440–1).

  4. 4.

    Just as the non-referential languages of animals (Sect. 3.2.2) have other functions that do not utilize representational properties, so has ours: we greet (“Hi”), cheer (“Bravo”), abuse (“Bastard”), and curse (“Shit”). I will return to this briefly in Sect. 4.2, but will mostly set it aside. The focus is always on the representational properties.

  5. 5.

    Chomskians have a different view. They see a human language as an internal state not a system of external symbols that represent the world. I argued (2003, 2006b: 17–41) that this is deeply misguided. This led to some always lively and sometimes nasty exchanges: Collins 2006, Matthews 2006, Rattan 2006, Rey 2006b, and Smith 2006, responded to in Devitt 2006c; Collins 2008a, b and Rey 2008, responded to in Devitt 2008a, b, c, 2013e; Antony 2008 and Pietroski 2008, responded to in Devitt 2008c; Longworth 2009 and Slezak 2009, responded to in Devitt 2009; Ludlow 2009, responded to in Devitt 2013h; Collins 2020 and Rey 2020b, responded to in Devitt 2020b. (Rey’s paper is marred by a serious misrepresentation: the allegation that my view of language arises from a methodological “commitment to Moorean commonsense” (2020b: 307). This charge is obviously baseless, as I point out, 2020b: 429–31.)

  6. 6.

    Some philosophers and linguists, impressed by the great difference between a human language and the representational systems used by other animals, resist calling those systems “languages”. I can see no theoretical point to this resistance. In any case, the point is merely verbal.

  7. 7.

    Consider also these from the classics:

    [N]o one is able to persuade me that the correctness of names is determined by anything besides convention… No name belongs to a particular thing by nature, but only because of the rules and usages of those who establish the usage and call it by that name—Hermogenes in Plato’s Cratylus (384c–d)

    A name is a spoken sound significant by convention… I say “by convention” because no name is a name naturally but only when it has become a symbol.—Aristotle De Interpretatione (16a.20–28)

  8. 8.

    Stephen Neale has the contrary view that although an expression type has a meaning we have no theoretical need to ascribe a meaning, a reference, etc. to a linguistic token; see Sect. 6.4 and 6.5 for discussion.

  9. 9.

    Multiplicity could, in principle, arise from multiple innate rules for a symbol but, so far as I know, there is no example of this in nature.

  10. 10.

    We doubtless have some theoretical interest also in the non-representational properties of our language used in greeting, cursing, and the like. But I am mostly setting them aside; see note 4.

  11. 11.

    What-is-said by an utterance of an “eternal sentence” would be constituted solely by properties of type (i).

  12. 12.

    This needs qualification because what-is-said using a sub-sentential is sometimes only a fragment of a proposition; see Chap. 12. Kent Bach has a more austere notion of what-is-said, discussed in Sects. 6.1, 6.2 and 6.3.

  13. 13.

    My what-is-said abstracts from differences between utterances that are assertions, rehearsals, questions, commands, and so on.

  14. 14.

    A speaker might intend to convey more than one message. I am simplifying by setting this possibility aside.

  15. 15.

    Of course, if it were not for the fact that a speaker’s utterance was intentionally produced, she would no more have thereby said the proposition p than she would have meant the proposition q. So we might ordinarily say that the speaker “meant” both propositions. But this ordinary way of speaking does not provide a theoretical motivation for treating the distinct items, what-is-said and the message, as parts of the one “meaning”. (There is a subtle issue about the relation of the intentional act of uttering to what-is-said; see Sect. 6.2.)

  16. 16.

    Salmon is used to hearing this response and is not impressed: “‘It’s all just terminology’ is the last refuge of the speech-act centered conception” (2005: 327). Kepa Korta and John Perry’s view (2007: 98–9) that “something has gone awry” in Cappelen and Lepore’s account of “semantic minimalism” (2005: 143–5) seems to rest simply on an insistence that ‘semantics’ be used narrowly.

  17. 17.

    This is nicely demonstrated by Bach 1999 and Ezcurdia and Stainton 2012.

  18. 18.

    Note that the common description of pragmatics as “the science of language in use” does not distinguish the two meanings.

  19. 19.

    This is presumably related somehow to the confusion of the metaphysics of meaning with the epistemology of interpretation that I discuss in Chap. 7.

  20. 20.

    See Pagin and Pelletier (2007: 35) for a nice statement of this sort of view.

  21. 21.

    Relevance theorists take the traditional view of communication to be “the code model” according to which “communication is achieved by encoding and decoding messages” (Sperber and Wilson 1995: 2). This is a bit misleading because the tradition had surely noted the obvious fact that understanding a message requires not just decoding but also reference fixing and disambiguation.

  22. 22.

    And to explain some non-communicative uses of language; see Sect. 4.2.

  23. 23.

    As Manuel García-Carpintero says: “the semantics/pragmatics divide is in my view ultimately about which meaning-properties are constitutive of natural languages and which are not” (2006: 43).

  24. 24.

    These novel implicatures are “particularized conversational implicatures”. What about “generalized” ones? These are more controversial and I’m dubious that there are any such pragmatic phenomena; see later (Sects. 8.4, 9.4, 11.2.6).

  25. 25.

    According to Falkum “the distinction between linguistic semantics and pragmatics is seen as corresponding to different processes involved in utterance comprehension” (2015: 89). The word “corresponding” is important here. For, categorizing utterances as having PM-meanings rather than the traditional WIS-meanings does indeed demand a corresponding difference in the process of understanding the utterances: “most of the interpretive work is performed…by pragmatic processes operating over underspecified semantic representations” (p. 89).

  26. 26.

    Also in reaction time studies, eye tracking, and electromagnetic brain potentials. Perhaps philosophers can get inspiration from these experiments too.

  27. 27.

    I sum up my discussion of linguistic evidence: “the main evidence for grammars is not found in the intuitions of ordinary speakers but rather in a combination of the corpus, the evidence of what we would say and understand, and the intuitions of linguists” (2006a: 488, 2006b: 100).

  28. 28.

    I draw on my 2010a: 94.

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  1. Philosophy Program, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York, New York, NY, USA

    Michael Devitt

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Devitt, M. (2021). The Semantics-Pragmatics Distinction. In: Overlooking Conventions. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 29. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-70653-1_3

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