Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

 

Opening Up New (and Old) Vistas on the Contextualist-Minimalist Debate [Special Issue]

Issue: Issue 15 • Author/s: Ernesto Perini-Santos
Topics: Philosophy of language, Philosophy of mind, Theoretical philosophy

The border war between semantics and pragmatics has an early version in the dispute between Mates and Cavell. While Mates argues for a strict separation between semantic inferences and mere pragmatic regularities, Cavell argues for a “logic of ordinary language”, identifying the commitments following the act of saying something. This answer gives a clue to the contemporary debate between minimalists and contextualists: we may either think that pragmatic inferences are only effective after the proposition is grasped, or think that it is part of the determination of what is said.…