Linguistic Conventions and the Role of Pragmatics

As reflected in the title of their book, Ernie Lepore and Matthew Stone maintain that there are two ways in which language productions (spoken or written) can engage our minds. On the one hand, there are linguistic conventions, which are entirely responsible for the public propositional content that our utterances convey, so grasping that content is a matter of knowing the relevant conventions. These contents are entered on the conversational scoreboard, which keeps a record of our meaning-making and the constraints on it. 1 On the other hand, certain uses of language call for an (often open-ended) imaginative engagement with the imagery of an utterance; these include various kinds of figurative uses of language, certain evocative literal uses, and cases of ‘invited inference’. This kind of activity has an essentially private significance; although interlocutors may end up sharing insights by this means, those are not components of the public meaning-making endeavour.