Par intervenant > Marchesan Eduardo

Intention's role in truth
Eduardo Marchesan  1@  
1 : University of São Paulo  (USP)

This paper compares two versions of the so called radical contextualist approach in philosophy of language: François Recanati's Truth Conditional Pragmatics and Charles Travis' Occasion-sensitivity. Radical contextualism has as its general negative thesis the idea that you cannot fix the truth conditions of a sentence apart from a particular situation in which it is being uttered. Therefore, the views of the aforementioned authors have sometimes been seen as equivalent, since they both advocate that the variation in the meaning of context sensitive expressions is not necessarily determined by semantic rules, i.e. they do not follow the indexical model. By comparing the way in which these authors criticize Grice's notion of what is said, my paper shows that, despite their agreement in this general negative thesis, Travis' and Recanati's views are deeply incompatible. While Recanati admits that what is said by a speaker is influenced by his intentions in a way that blurs the traditional distinction between semantics and pragmatics, he still supports the notion that the meaning of subsentential elements are representational. If the speaker's intention determines what is said, it does so by operating on the literal meaning of the subsentential elements. Since Travis denies that the meaning of words can be representational, his thesis and Recanati's are irreconcilable. By defending Travis' read, this papers holds that the extra-linguistic factor responsible for fixing the truth conditions of an utterance cannot be the speaker's intentions as described by Recanati.


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