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Representing One's Own and Others' Minds (Through Explicatures)

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Representing One's Own and Others' Minds (Through Explicatures) Università degli Studi di Palermo Dottorato in Filosofia del linguaggio e della mente Between Minds: representing one’s own and others’ minds (through explicatures). Alessandro Capone Dipartimento di Filosofia, Storia e Critica dei saperi Settore disciplinare MFIL/05 Il dottorando: Il Coordinatore: Il Tutor: anno accademico 2011-2012 i Abstract In this dissertation, I show how promising pragmatic intrusion based on the notion of explicature can be in dealing with various topics belonging to epistemology and knowledge transmission, such as propositional attitude reports, attitudes ‘de se’, Immunity to Error through Misidentification, knowing how, quotation and indirect reports. The dissertation is divided into two parts. In the first part, I discuss theoretical problems pertaining to the notion of explicatures, the most important of which is ‘Are explicatures cancellable?’ . I argue that they are not. I support this position further through considerations on modularity of mind. I also discuss the picture of inferential pragmatics by pointing out connections between Relevance Theory and Default semantics. I apply notions of modularity of mind and non-cancellability of explicatures to definite descriptions. I also address basic problems pertaining to semantic minimalism and I argue that it is compatible with contextualism. In part 2, I deal with attitude reports and explain how to deal with failure of substitutivity of identicals in terms of pragmatic intrusion. I provide further evidence showing that pragmatic intrusion must be postulated in propositional attitude reports. The discussion on pragmatic intrusion continues with attitudes ‘de se’, which are discussed in terms of semantics and philosophy. I explore various cases of inferences in which ‘de se’ attitudes involve an explicature based on an Ego concept. I argue that Immunity to Error through Misidentification largely depends on semantico/pragmatic considerations and, in particular, on pragmatic intrusion. In this thesis I also explore analogies between propositional attitude reports and indirect reports, from the point of view of substitutivity of identicals. In connection with indirect reports, I expatiate on inferential processes that are non-reflective and independent of context and inferential processes which heavily depend on context (thus the connection between indirect reports and language games). Knowing how is discussed in terms of pragmatic intrusion. I show, in fact, that many problems relating to knowing- how cannot be understood without an application of the notion of explicature. Finally, I provide a view of quotation that is essentially pragmatic and radical, on the grounds that it is more parsimonious that a view which starts with semantics. ii Table of contents Introduction……………………………..…………………………….…..……p. 1 Part 1: Pragmatics and modularity of mind………………………..….….……p. 11 Chapter 1: Are explicatures cancellable? ………………….……………....….p. 12 Chapter 2: Default semantics and the architecture of the mind……………………………………………………………..………..……p. 50 Chapter 3: What can modularity of mind tell us about the semantics/pragmatics debate ................................................................................................................p. 81 Chapter 4: The attributive/referential distinction, pragmatics, modularity of mind and modularization……………………………………………………….…,.p. 109 Chapter 5: Further reflections on semantic minimalism: reply to Wedgwood……….…..……..……………………………………………..p. 154 Part 2: Propositional attitudes, knowledge transmission and pragmatics………………….…………….………………………………..…p.199 Chapter 6: Belief reports and pragmatic intrusion…….……….…………….p.200 Chapter 7: On the social practice of indirect reports…….…….….……….....p. 242 Chapter 8: Indirect reports as language games…………….….…………….p. 270 Chapter 9: Knowing-how and pragmatic intrusion………………….….……p.291 Chapter 10: The semantics and pragmatics of attitudes ‘de se’………...……p. 326 Chapter 11: Immunity to error through misidentification (IEM), ‘de se’ and pragmatic intrusion): a linguistic treatment…………………………..……. p. 383 iii Chapter 12: The pragmatics of quotation: explicatures and modularity of mind…………………………………….……………………………..……...p. 412 Conclusion………………………..……………………….….………..…….p. 450 References ……………………………………………..………………….….p.454 iv Acknowledgments I would like to give my warmest thanks to my tutor Franco Lo Piparo, Marco Carapezza, Francesca Piazza, Marco Mazzone, Luigi Pavone, and Pietro Perconti. A number of other philosophers and linguists should be properly thanked for their comments, encouragement and practical help: Jacob L. Mey, Wayne Davis, Igor Douven, Noel Burton-Roberts, Neil Feit, Istvan Kecskes, Yan Huang, Paul Saka, Igor Douven, Timothy Williamson, Katarzyna Jaszczolt, James Higginbotham, Ernie Lepore, Louise Cummings, Ken Turner, Michel Seymour, Dr. Wedgwood and Keith Allan. 1 Introduction In this dissertation I tackled various topics which were interconnected in my mind, proceeding from topic to topic guided by the need to know more and to have access to the mysteries of areas of pragmatics and philosophy of mind which fascinated me. I never got tired to write this dissertation and it was only a temporal limit which made me stop. I am sure that from here I can proceed to more challenging topics, but this will be left for another day. For years, I was fascinated by Gricean pragmatics and in this thesis I was able to use the more conservative as well as the least conservative and innovative strands of research in pragmatics. In particular, I took the notion of (conversational) explicature and from there I moved on to explore topics in the philosophy of mind with particular attention to communicative intentions. Gricean pragmatics mainly deals with a speaker’s communicative intentions as manifested through her speech. Intentions, of course, are in the speaker’s head; however, if they were solely in the speaker’s head, they could not come out, they could not emerge from her mind and be shared with the co-participants (through communication). This sharing of intentions happens when a speaker manages to get her message across. Now, clearly this practice is not like putting a message into a bottle and putting it to sea in the hope that someone, if anyone at all picks up the bottle, will be induced to open it, read the message and then carry out an action. Sending a message in daily interaction is to shape the message in such a way that the speaker’s intention(s) can be recognized by the hearers. Recognition can be aided through contextual cues and clues, consciously used by the speaker and known by the speaker to be conducive to an interpretation process allowing 2 speaker’s intentions and hearer’s interpretations (of the message) to match. Cues may lead a hearer to detect an interpretation problem (e.g. a mismatch between the literal and the non-literal level of meaning) and clues can serve to fill the gaps left in the text (Dascal and Weizman 1987). Projection of speaker’s intentions occurs through a continuum from a more conscious (and sometimes tactical) process, involving a deliberate planning process determining the inferential procedure and anticipating partially or completely the interpretation moves of the hearer to a less conscious and finally automatic, or even routinized and standardized process. But now it is clear that the pragmatic enterprise is not like bottle throwing in the hope that the message in the bottle will be recovered by someone; the message must be shaped by taking into account the concrete situation of the utterance and the predispositions of the hearers to pick up the cues and clues that direct the communication process. We have a hearer whose history we know, we have a person in front of us, and we use part of the history we share with her and the background assumptions that normally have a bearing on the understanding of a message to anticipate the direction which the interpretation work will take. Anticipating an inferential process is important for the speaker, as he thereby manifests the awareness that his intentions will be most probably interpreted correctly, arriving at a match between the speaker’s intentions and the hearer’s interpretation. We furthermore use principles of language use (whether we accept Gricean pragmatics or a theory à la Sperber and Wilson) to anticipate the direction which the interpretation process will take. Without a similarity in the cognitive make up of the speaker and the hearer, there would be little chance that what the hearer arrives at are the speaker’s intentions. It is the fact that the speaker can rely on this (biologically determined) cognitive similarity and on the awareness of certain principles of cognition, which are valid both for the speaker and the hearer, that guarantees that the inferential path is predictable on an objective basis. So a theory of interpretation, to be of genuine interest, must also be one of the speaker’s intentions. Intentions and recovered messages are both the objects of pragmatics, since speakers and hearers both shape their codification and interpretation processes by taking into account principles of language use (whether the Gricean maxims or a single cognitive/communicative principle). It is the intersubjectivity of the interpretation path which Jaszczolt (1999) calls the social path of interpretation. 3 Is it true that semantics only provides schematic information which is then expanded into propositional forms through pragmatic processes? This is clearly one of the problems tackled in this thesis,
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