Local pragmatics in a Gricean framework

The pragmatic framework developed by H.P. Grice in “Logic and Conversation” explains how a speaker can mean something more than, or different from, the conventional meaning of the sentence she utters. But it has been argued that the framework cannot give a similar explanation for cases where these pragmatic effects impact the understood content of an embedded clause, such as the antecedent of a conditional, a clausal disjunct, or the clausal complement of a verb. In this paper, I show that such an explanation is available. One of the central arguments of the paper (Section 2) is that in a significant subset of cases, local pragmatic effects are a consequence of a global (utterance-level) pragmatic requirement. In these cases, local pragmatic effects are a consequence of ‘acting locally’ to resolve a potential global pragmatic violation. These cases do not require us to posit application of pragmatic principles (Maxims of Conversation) to the contents of embedded clauses. The account does, though, require the assumption that interpreters can identify and reason about the contents of unasserted sub-parts of sentences, an assumption that I motivate in section 3. Building on this, in section 4 of the paper, I argue that once we have recognized that interpreters can, and do, reason independently about the contents of non-asserted clauses, it becomes unproblematic to assume that in some cases, Gricean conversational principles do apply directly to these contents, providing an alternative route to account for local pragmatic effects. In revisiting the ideas of this paper in my response to the commentaries, I consider in more detail the revisions to Grice’s broader program that are necessitated by these moves, in particular acknowledging the problematicity of Grice’s notion of what is said. I argue that the starting point for Gricean reconstructions should instead be merely what is expressed, which carries no pragmatic commitments regarding what is speaker meant.     

Epistemic justification and the ignorance excuse

One of the most common excuses is ignorance. Ignorance does not always excuse, however, for sometimes ignorance is culpable. One of the most natural ways to think of the difference between exculpating and culpable ignorance is in terms of justification; that is, one’s ignorance is exculpating only if it is justified and one’s ignorance is culpable only if it not justified (call this the justification thesis). Rosen (J Phil 105(10):591–610, 2008) explores this idea by first offering a brief account of justification, and then two cases that he claims are counter examples to the justification thesis. The aim of this paper is to defend the justification thesis against Rosen’s two cases. The argument will proceed in the following way. First, I clarify a few things about the nature of culpable ignorance generally and why the justification thesis is so intuitive. I then present Rosen’s purported counterexamples. Once this is done, I argue that Rosen misses an important view of justification in the epistemology literature that I call the pragmatic view. I present a general picture of the pragmatic view, and explain how it fits naturally with our practices of criticizing people’s beliefs, including claims of culpable ignorance. Finally, I address Rosen’s cases arguing that, if the pragmatic view is right, then Rosen’s cases are not counterexamples to the justification thesis.     

Real Representation of Fictional Objects

Assuming there are fictional objects, what sorts of properties do they have? Intuitively, most of their properties involve being represented—appearing in works of fiction, being depicted as clever, being portrayed by actors, being admired or feared, and so on. But several philosophers, including Saul Kripke, Peter van Inwagen, Kendall Walton, and Amie Thomasson, argue that even if there are fictional objects, they are not really represented in some or all of these cases. I reconstruct four kinds of arguments for this unexpected conclusion; they concern the semantics of names, pragmatic force, creation, and representations’ qualitative content. But I find all the arguments flawed. I then argue for the contrary, employing a new perspective: representation of fictional objects begins with the works of fiction that originate them. A work of fiction represents its “native” objects because our culture bestows that property on it (and on other works of fiction). I sketch conditions for such property bestowal and argue that they are satisfied in this case.     

Nietzsche’s pragmatic genealogy of justice

This paper analyses the connection between Nietzsche’s early employment of the genealogical method and contemporary neo-pragmatism. The paper has two goals. On the one hand, by viewing Nietzsche’s writings in the light of neo-pragmatist ideas and reconstructing his approach to justice as a pragmatic genealogy, it seeks to bring out an under-appreciated aspect of his genealogical method which illustrates how genealogy can be used to vindicate rather than to subvert, and accounts for Nietzsche’s lack of historical references. On the other hand, by highlighting what Nietzsche has to offer neo-pragmatism, it seeks to contribute to neo-pragmatism’s conception of genealogy. The paper argues that Nietzsche and the neo-pragmatists share a naturalistic concern and a pragmatist strategy in responding to it. The paper then shows that Nietzsche avoids a reductive form of functionalism by introducing a temporal axis, but that this axis should be understood as a developmental model rather than as historical time. This explains Nietzsche’s failure to engage with history. The paper concludes that pragmatic genealogy can claim a genuinely Nietzschean pedigree.     

Kant's Pragmatism

This article offers a definition of the term ‘pragmatic’, as it is used in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. The definition offered does not make any reference to the affinities between Kant's pragmatism and the philosophies of the American or other pragmatists but draws its definiens entirely from the Kantian conceptual framework. It states that the term ‘pragmatic’ denotes imperatives, laws and beliefs of a specific type: an imperative is pragmatic if and only if it is concerned with the choice of means to individual or universal happiness; a law is pragmatic if and only if our willingness to presuppose it results from our obedience to a pragmatic imperative; and a belief is pragmatic if and only if it relates to the objective validity of pragmatic laws. This article also discusses two rival definitions of the term ‘pragmatic’ (as used by Kant) that have been brought forward by Sidney Axinn and Nicholas Rescher.     

Knowledge,conservatism, and pragmatics

The apparent contextual variability exhibited by ‘knows’ and its cognates—brought to attention in examples like Keith DeRose’s Bank Case—poses familiar problems for conservative forms of invariantism about ‘knows’. The paper examines and criticises a popular response to those problems, one that involves appeal to so-called ‘pragmatic’ features of language. It is first argued, contrary to what seems to have been generally assumed, that any pragmatic defence faces serious problems with regard to our judgments about retraction. Second, the familiar objection that the pragmatic effects at issue do not seem to be cancellable is considered. Advocates of the pragmatic defence have suggested that cancellability concerns can be dealt with fairly readily. It is shown both that their recent attempts to respond to those concerns, and some other possible attempts, are unsuccessful. Finally, it is argued that the popular relevance-based accounts, found in the work of Jessica Brown, Alan Hazlett, and Patrick Rysiew, fail to provide a satisfactory explanation of our judgments.     

Embedded Pragmatic Effects and Conversational Implicatures

In a recent paper Mandy Simons has argued that in a Gricean framework there is room for embedded pragmatic effects. One of her goals has been to demonstrate that an argument put forward by François Recanati to the effect that it is not possible to apply Gricean reasoning to generation of local pragmatic effects is mistaken. In his commentary Recanati maintains that the view suggested by Simons can be called Gricean only in a very broad sense and insists that the process responsible for local effects is essentially different from the one which generates conversational implicatures. In my view their exchange highlights important issues concerning the way in which local pragmatic effects are generated and is worthy of a careful analysis. In what follows I critically examine Simons’s and Recanati’s views and then suggest the view that in the light of this analysis seems to me the most adequate. In particular, I argue—against Recanati—that during the interpretation process interpreters construct literal propositional nuclei, which usually fell short of being truth-evaluable but which play an important role in the interpretation. I claim that the view that assumes that such literal propositions are constructed in the process of interpretation is more universal and may be used to analyse a wider range of examples than the view that does not postulate such constructions. Nevertheless, I maintain—against Simons—that the global and local pragmatic inferences are importantly different.

     

The African Renaissance as a reversal of conquest expressed in naming: An Afrocentric engagement

The African Renaissance is historically an African revolutionary project aimed at reclaiming and reviving African heritage that was destroyed by European slavery and colonialism. One of the manifestations of the African Renaissance was to do away with European names imposed on African countries, and to replace them with African names. While this was a good move, it was a half-measure because it ignored the gender aspect of colonial naming which saw a European cultural legacy of naming women after their husbands’ surnames remaining intact. Socially, this colonial practice promoted gender inequality by elevating husbands’ family names while relegating wives’ family names to a lower place. Politically, the exercise reduced women into being their husbands’ shadows even when women use double-barrel surnames. This colonial legacy’s suffocating effect on women’s identities was laid bare towards the African National Congress’ (ANC) elective conference in 2017. The Zuma family name was used to frustrate Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma’s contestation for the ANC’s presidency when her opponents argued that being the ex-wife of Jacob Zuma, the then ANC’s and South Africa’s president, would deter her from acting independently. The central argument here is that for the African Renaissance project to be meaningful and relevant for women, it must reclaim African women’s cultural right to retain their own family names and not adopt their husbands’.     

Local vs. global pragmatics

In ‘Local pragmatics in a Gricean framework’, Mandy Simons argues that, contrary to the received view, it is possible to accommodate local pragmatic effects utilising just the mechanisms for pragmatic reasoning provided by Grice. Although I agree with this overarching claim, this paper argues that we need to be careful in our understanding of ‘what is said’, and the nature of communicated content in general, when deciding between local and global accounts of pragmatic effects.     

性别化名字对个体印象评价及人际交往的影响

名字在个体印象评价和人际交往中发挥着重要作用。本研究结合刻板印象内容模型, 从刻板印象维护视角出发, 通过3个研究考察了性别化名字的热情能力感知, 基于此探究性别化名字对不同性别个体的印象评价及人际交往的影响。结果发现：(1)人们对男性化名字的能力评价高于女性化名字, 对女性化名字的热情评价高于男性化名字; (2)性别化名字影响男性的能力评价和女性的热情评价; (3)性别化名字影响人们对女性的交友偏好, 热情评价在其中起到完全中介作用; 性别化名字影响人们和男性的共事偏好, 能力评价起到完全中介作用。研究揭示了性别化名字影响印象评价的模式, 并为理解人际交往中名字的作用机制提供了新的研究思路。     

Knowledge and implicatures

In recent work on the semantics of ‘knowledge’-attributions, a variety of accounts have been proposed that aim to explain the data about speaker intuitions in familiar cases such as DeRose’s Bank Case or Cohen’s Airport Case by means of pragmatic mechanisms, notably Gricean implicatures. This paper argues that pragmatic explanations of the data regarding ‘knowledge’-attributions are unsuccessful and concludes that in explaining those data we have to resort to accounts that (a) take those data at their semantic face value (Epistemic Contextualism, Subject-Sensitive Invariantism or Epistemic Relativism), or (b) reject them on psychological grounds (Moderate Insensitive Invariantism). To establish this conclusion, the paper relies solely upon widely accepted assumptions about pragmatic theory, broadly construed, and on the Stalnakerian insight that linguistic communication takes place against the backdrop of a set of mutually accepted propositions: a conversation’s common ground.     

The effect of increasing the memorability of category instances on estimates of category size

According to Tversky and Kahneman’s (1973) availability heuristic, people sometimes make use of the ease with which instances are retrieved when they have to estimate proportions or frequencies. One implication of this availability heuristic is that any factor that affects memorability of instances from a category should also affect the estimated category size. In one of their experiments, Tversky and Kahneman found that, after being presented with a list of names, people judged the more famous names to be more frequent. Similarly, recall was found to be greater for the more famous names. Three experiments that used Tversky and Kahneman’s paradigm are reported. Repeating nonfamous names resulted in their increased recallability and a corresponding increase in estimates of their frequency (Experiments 1 and 3). Making nonfamous names more salient (Experiment 3) also had parallel effects on recallability and frequency estimates, indicating that different memory manipulations affected availability in a similar fashion. Furthermore, reliance on the heuristic was not changed as a function of prior knowledge (Experiment 2) or practice (Experiment 3)     

On the relationship between reading, listening, and speaking: It’s different for people’s names

Two experiments are reported that tested predictions derived from the framework of face, object, and word recognition proposed by Valentine, Brennen, and Brédart (1996). The findings were as follows: (1) Production of a celebrity’s name in response to seeing the celebrity’s face primed a subsequent familiarity decision to the celebrity’s printed name. The degree of repetition priming observed was as great as that observed when a familiarity decision to the printed name was repeated in the prime and test phases of the experiment. (2) Making a familiarity decision to an auditory presentation of a celebrity’s name primed a familiarity decision to the same celebrity’s name presented visually. The magnitude of cross-modality priming was as great as the magnitude of within-modality repetition priming. This result for people’s names contrasted with the effects observed in lexical decision tasks, in which no reliable cross-modality priming was observed. The results cannot be accounted for by previous models of face and name processing. They show a marked contrast between processing people’s names and processing words. The results support the framework proposed by Valentine et al. (1996). The implications for models of speech production, perception, and reading are discussed, together with the potential of the methodology to elucidate our understanding of proper name processing.     

自我相关信息的加工优势：来自网名识别的证据

以网名为材料, 通过三项视觉搜索实验考察了与自我相关的网络信息可能存在的加工优势。结果发现, 自己的网名在作为靶刺激时可以更快且更准确地被探测出来; 而在作为干扰刺激时, 其对于靶刺激却并未表现出比对照刺激更强的抑制作用。在与真实人名进行的直接比较中, 自己的网名与真实人名的加工成绩未出现显著差异, 且都好于作为对照的名人名字。这些结果证明了与自我相关的网络信息具有和物理世界中的自我信息相似的加工优势, 且与以真实人名为材料的多项实验结果完全一致, 从而表明自己的网名与真实人名可能具有相同的加工机制。     

Is visual attention automatically attracted by one’s own name?

Subjects were presented with briefly exposed visual displays of words that were common first names with a length of four to six letters. In the main experiment, each display consisted of four words: two names shown in red and two shown in white. The subject’s task was to report the red names (targets), but ignore the white ones (distractors). On some trials the subject’s own name appeared as a display item (target or distractor). Presentation of the subject’s name as a distractor caused no more interference with report of targets than did presentation of other names as distractors. Apparently, visual attention was not automatically attracted by the subject’s own name.     

Reactions to the fate of one’s brain-child after its disclosure

After generating an idea we believe is original, we want it to be credited as original and receive recognition for it. So, we would be upset if its originality were questioned, or if our link to that intellectual self-extension were threatened, and we would cope with self-protective strategies. This rationale prompted an experiment with seventy-five female undergraduates. They (P) were to imagine drafting a paper for submission to a national creativity fair proposing a novel method for determining the structure of things, but then decided against submitting it. Fellow-participant, O, learning of P's decision to withdraw, borrows P’s draft. Later, P submits a revised, retitled draft that, unfortunately, goes astray. Still later P discovers that O, without P's knowledge and consent, submitted a copy of P’s original draft to the fair, listing O’s name, both names, or P’s name as author(s), and that the idea was or was not judged as original. Origination and recognition credit allocation had predicted effects on P’s emotional reaction, evaluation of the judges’competence, and of O’s trustworthiness. Unexpect-edly low self-evaluated creativity and sociability, and low desire for future collabora-tion, were obtained when recognition went to P and O jointly. We discuss the applica-bility of belief agreement-attraction and cognitive balance models, of imitation as flattery, of self-esteem as a moderator, and whether our results are culture-bound. Finally, we note how the reactions hint at conflict between inclinations toward altru-ism versus narcissistic self-interest when it comes to sharing one’s self-generated intellectual products with others.