Premium
Pragmatic Particularism
Author(s) -
Buchanan Ray,
Ian Schiller Henry
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
philosophy and phenomenological research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.7
H-Index - 39
eISSN - 1933-1592
pISSN - 0031-8205
DOI - 10.1111/phpr.12801
Subject(s) - utterance , pragmatics , meaning (existential) , appeal , defeasible estate , sentence , context (archaeology) , linguistics , epistemology , grice , content (measure theory) , philosophy , history , mathematics , law , archaeology , political science , mathematical analysis
For the Intentionalist , utterance content is wholly determined by a speaker’s meaning‐intentions; the sentence uttered serves merely to facilitate the audience’s recovering these intentions. We argue that Intentionalists ought to be Particularists , holding that the only “principles” of meaning recovery needed are those governing inferences to the best explanation; “principles” that are both defeasible and, in a sense to be elaborated, variable . We discuss some ways in which some theorists have erred in trying to tame the “wild west” of pragmatics and context‐sensitivity – including recent work that makes essential appeal to the information structure of a discourse – and in so doing, offer a general recipe for defending the Particularist picture of utterance content and its recovery that we favor.