On the Social Practice of Indirect Reports
This chapter deals with the social practice of indirect reports and treats them as cases of language games. It proposes a number of principles like the following:
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On the Social Practice of Indirect Reports
2.1
Introduction
In this chapter, I shall deal with the social practice of indirect speech reports, a topic that has connections with speech act theory and propositional attitudes. I quite agree with Cresswell (2000), mainly a critique of Davidson (1968), that the study of indirect reports needs to incorporate pragmatics, but I shall certainly advocate the view that the practice of indirect reports requires limits to the information that counts as ‘samesaying’ (a term dear to Davidson 1968) and that these can be ascertained by studying societal pragmatics (Mey 2001; Capone 2003b). As Mey says: Pragmatics admonishes the linguistic scientists that they should take the users of language more seriously, as they, after all, provide the bread and butter of linguistic theorizing (…) (Mey 2001, 289). If readers expect a mathematical formula to capture the logic of indirect reports, they will be disappointed; following Strawson (1952, 344; cf. Levinson 1983, 175), I am persuaded that “ordinary language has no exact logic” and that the best one can do is to propose that one can master the practice of indirect reports if one is ready to apply a number of constraints. I shall argue that the samesaying relation is to some extent pragmatically determined; the consequence of this is to accept that exchanging different NPs within the same indirect report does not necessarily reverse the truth-value (Cappelen and Lepore 1997a, b). I shall also argue that indirect speech reports are transformations of original speech events, subject to severe limitations. I shall study the interactions with the theory of pragmemes, of indexicals and of modes of presentation. I end this chapter suggesting that a key to the understanding of indirect reports is the exploration of analogies with the theory of speech acts and that, on the contrary, analogies with the theory of propositional attitudes may be misleading. As Verschueren says: pragmatics does not constitute an additional component of a theory of language, but it offers a different perspective (Verschueren 1999, 2). © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2016 A. Capone, The Pragmatics of Indirect Reports, Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology 8, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-41078-4_2
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Chapter 2
It is not surprising, therefore, that many otherwise inexplicable phenomena can be explained away by showing that NP substitutions affect the speech act expressed by an utterance. In this chapter, it is my wish to draw the implications of the theory of pragmemes, which I have advanced in other articles (Capone 2005a) following ideas broached by Mey (2001) and to apply them to areas of inquiry which certainly need to be revisited with modern and efficient analytical tools, such as the detailed study of the interplay between speech acts and context. Philosophical approaches to the issue of indirect reports, useful though they are, cannot exhaustively deal with the issue because they are not societally-oriented. Instead, a theory of p
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