Abstract
In this paper I undertake to resolve a main pragmatic puzzle triggered by Bank-type cases. After accepting ‘sanitized’ intuitions about Truth-Values, as reflected in x-phi experiments, the pragmatic puzzle about whether the husband is inconsistent remains, and if he isn’t (contrary to a first-blush impression), which intuitively is the case, how are we to explain it. The context in such cases is pragmatic, with awareness of high risks, and the treatment I propose is pragmatic as well, but not Gricean. I offer a new Pragmatics whose main tools are Steering Thrust (towards, e.g., action) and Posting. It focuses on what I call Action-Directed Pragmatics. An overall view of Pragmatics centers on the primary resort to Sayability rather than to Truth-Values, and to the Pragmatic phenomenon of co-present operative norm-types, which can conflict in some cases vis-à-vis particular actions and about what subjects can say. The very satisfactory explanation of the above puzzle that I offer is in such terms. In particular, attention is focused on the phenomenon of Negative-Polarity Pragmatic Functors (such as: I don’t know that p, or: I am not sure that p; or: It might be that not-p).
Original language | English |
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Article number | 298 |
Journal | Synthese |
Volume | 200 |
Issue number | 4 |
DOIs | |
State | Published - Aug 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V.
Keywords
- Action-directed pragmatics
- Ascriber
- Assertibility
- Assertibility conditions
- Bank case
- Context
- DeRose
- Epistemic contextualism
- Epistemic norms
- Epistemic position
- Epistemic sayability
- Fantl
- Instrumental norms
- Invariantism
- Knowledge
- McGrath
- Negative polarity
- Norms
- Overall sayability
- Pragmatic encroachment
- Pragmatic functors
- Sayability
- SSI
- Stakes
- Stanley
- Steering Thrust
- Truth-conditions
- Weatherson