Linguistic Meaning, Communicated Meaning and Cognitive Pragmatics

Abstract

Within the philosophy of language, pragmatics has tended to be seen as an adjunct to, and a means of solving problems in, semantics. A cognitive-scientific conception of pragmatics as a mental processing system responsible for interpreting ostensive communicative stimuli (specifically, verbal utterances) has effected a transformation in the pragmatic issues pursued and the kinds of explanation offered. Taking this latter perspective, I compare two distinct proposals on the kinds of processes, and the architecture of the system(s), responsible for the recovery of speaker meaning (both explicitly and implicitly communicated meaning).

The Role of Storytelling in Personal Knowledge Convey

“…Potential properties of Personal Knowledge are not treated separately with the understanding of the conscious mind. It is necessary to interpret the consciously capturing process of the knowledge that is formed unconsciously (Carston, 2002).…”

What is said by a metaphor

“…We take it that a very important reason for contextualist proposals has to do with their commitment to a psychologically realistic pragmatics, which is usually called "cognitive pragmatics" (Kasher 1988). For instance, according to Carston (2002b), a theory of pragmatics should be a theory of communication: how thoughts are expressed and how they are interpreted. Such a theory would dispose of, or re-define, all the notions that come from philosophy of language but do not pick up any psychological kind.…”

Law and Conversational Implicatures

“…In particular, the relevant contextual elements include both the context of utterance, that is, the so-called triple ''time, place and speaker'' [20], to which it is opportune to add also the manner of the utterance, for example, if it was uttered laughing or with a grunt, the information relative to the listener, especially about her relationship with the speaker (if they are friends or strangers or countrymen, etc., and, especially, what they know about each other), and the so-called co-text, that is, the set of adjacent utterances, the sequence in which a given utterance occurs. 8 It is important to note how, to ensure a correct understanding, the context of utterance and the co-text must be known both by the listener and by the speaker: or better still, the listener must be aware that the speaker also knows them, that the speaker knows that the listener also knows them, that the speaker knows that the listener knows that the speaker knows them and so on. In short what Schiffer termed mutual knowledge must obtain.…”

“…Grice[14,15]; Levinson[22] 11. Conversational implicatures are not to be confused with conventional implicatures: the latter are inferences (not truth-functional) that do not derive from maxims, but are connected by convention to particular expressions or lexical elements: see Grice[13,14]; Levinson[22]; Bach[5,6], Carston[8]. In the present paper, conventional implicatures will not be investigated and the term ''implicature'' will be used to refer exclusively to conversational implicatures 24.…”