Explicatures are NOT Cancellable
In this chapter I argue that explicatures are not cancellable on theoretical grounds. I take that explicatures are loci of pragmatic intrusion, where pragmatics mimics semantics. I attempt to differentiate explicatures from conversational implicatures on
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Abstract In this chapter I argue that explicatures are not cancellable on theoretical grounds. I take that explicatures are loci of pragmatic intrusion, where pragmatics mimics semantics. I attempt to differentiate explicatures from conversational implicatures on logical grounds. I answer some objections to Capone (2009) by Seymour (2010) and I also respond to Carston (2010). The crucial problem addressed in this paper is whether by cancellability of explicatures we should intend the evaporation of an explicature from an act of saying when a different context is considered. I discuss the logical problems which this view gives rise to. In this paper, I explore the consequences of considering cancellability of an explicature a language game. I conclude that the cancellability test proposed by Carston can never be unified with the other side of cancellability (explicit cancellability cannot be unified with cancellability due to an aspect of the context that cancels the inference). Furthermore, I consider that cancellability à la Carston is neither a definitional, nor a constructive nor an eliminative language game. The paper makes use of important considerations by Burton-Roberts (2013) on intentionality and also discusses some of his examples.
1 Introduction In this chapter, I will not embark on the task of unifying various considerations on the cancellability of explicatures (or rather the lack of it) scattered in my papers on pragmatics and modularity of mind, attributive/referential and quotation. Since here I mainly want to deal with a high level of abstraction, I will not consider those data in detail (but I need to say that they appear ‘prima facie’ to support my own
A. Capone (&) University of Messina/Palermo, Messina, Italy e-mail: [email protected]
A. Capone et al. (eds.), Perspectives on Linguistic Pragmatics, Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology 2, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-01014-4_5, Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013
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inclination to say that explicatures are NOT cancellable). I confine myself to theoretical considerations which are in line with those data. The positive position I will explore, support and justify is that explicatures are natural loci of the tension between semantics and pragmatics, where the tension is resolved in favor of pragmatics but the cost involved is that pragmatics becomes more and more semanticised. And this may mean that explicatures should not be cancellable if they constitute loci of the tension between semantics and pragmatics and loci where pragmatics simply aims to mimic the semantic resources of the language, that is its truth-conditional apparatus. I have already hinted at this in my paper ‘On Grice’s circle’, even if the aim of that paper was to resolve a specific problem (the circularity of the view that explicatures take input from pragmatics and implicatures take input from explicatures), and not to address the general problem of how language mobilizes resources of a pragmatic nature to mimic seman
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