Cover not available

Article published In: Pragmatics & Cognition
Vol. 27:2 (2020) ► pp.387–407

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
authorization required

A properly pragmatist pragmatics

Peircean reflections on the distinction between semantics and pragmatics

 | Deakin University
Published online: 6 October 2021
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.20005.leg
Abstract
Although most contemporary philosophers of language hold that semantics and pragmatics require separate study, there is surprisingly little agreement on where exactly the line should be drawn between these two areas, and why. In this paper I suggest that this lack of clarity is at least partly caused by a certain historical obfuscation of the roots of the founding three-way distinction between syntax, semantics and pragmatics in Charles Peirce’s pragmatist philosophy of language. I then argue for recovering and revisiting these original roots, taking indexicality as a case-study of how certain questions connected with the distinction which are currently considered complex and difficult may be clarified by a ‘properly pragmatist pragmatics’. Such a view, I shall argue, upends a certain priority usually accorded to semantics over pragmatics, teaching that we do not work out what terms mean in some abstract overall sense and then work out to what use they are being put; rather, we must understand to what use terms are being put in order to understand what they mean.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.What is indexicality?
  • 3.‘Pre-indexical’ analytic formal semantics: The downfall of ‘pure’ semantics
  • 4.‘Post-indexical’ analytic formal semantics
  • 5.Indexicality in a semeiotic context
  • 6.Indexical purpose
  • 7.A properly pragmatist pragmatics
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
References (51)
References
Allwood, Jens. 1981. On the distinctions between semantics and pragmatics. In Wolfgang Klein & Willem Levelt (eds.), Crossing the boundaries in linguistics, 177–189. Dordrecht: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Atkin, Albert. 2005. Peirce on the index and indexical reference. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 61(1), 161–188.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bach, Kent. 2004. Pragmatics and the philosophy of language. In Laurence R. Horn & Gregory Ward (eds). The handbook of pragmatics, 463–487. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bar-Hillel, Yehoshua. 1954. Indexical expressions. Mind, New Series, 63(251). 359–379. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Bergman, Mats. 2009. Peirce’s philosophy of communication: The rhetorical underpinnings of the theory of signs. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Brandom, Robert. 1994. Making it explicit. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2008. Between saying and doing: Towards an analytic pragmatism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Braun, David. 2015. Indexicals. Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. [URL] (Downloaded June 9, 2019).
Brown, Roger. 1958. How shall a thing be called? Psychological Review 65(1). 14–21. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Castañeda, Hector-Neri. 1989. Direct reference, the semantics of thinking, and guise theory. In James Almog, John Perry & Howard Wettstein (eds.), Themes from Kaplan, 105–144. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Champagne, Marc. 2015. A less simplistic metaphysics: Peirce’s layered theory of meaning as a layered theory of being. Sign Systems Studies 43(4). 523–559. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2019. ______ is necessary for interpreting a proposition. Chinese Semiotic Studies 15(1). 39–48. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Davidson, Donald. 1967. Truth and meaning. Synthese 17(1). 304–323. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Davies, Martin & Lloyd Humberstone. 1980. Two notions of necessity. Philosophical Studies 38(1). 1–30. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fotion, Nick. 1995. Pragmatics. In Ted Honderich (ed.), The Oxford companion to philosophy, 23–43. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gazdar, Gerald. 1979. Pragmatics: Implicature, presupposition, and logical form. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Gendler-Szabó, Zoltan. 2005. Semantics versus pragmatics. Oxford: OUP. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Goudge, Thomas. 1965. Peirce’s index. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 1(2). 52–70.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Horn, Laurence R. & Gregory Ward (eds.). 2004. The handbook of pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Houser, Nathan. 2020. Semiotics and philosophy. The American Journal of Semiotics, forthcoming. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Husserl, Edmund. 1913. Logical investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay. London: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kaplan, David. 1989. Demonstratives: An essay on the semantics, logic, metaphysics and epistemology of demonstratives. In James Almog, John Perry & Howard Wettstein (eds.), Themes from Kaplan, 481–565. Oxford: OUP.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Katz, Jerrold. 1977. Propositional structure and illocutionary force: A study of the contribution of sentence meaning to speech acts. New York: Crowell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kempson, Ruth. 1988. Grammar and conversational principles. In Frederick Newmeyer (ed.), Linguistics: The Cambridge survey, vol. 21, 139–163. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Korta, Kepa & John Perry. 2015. Pragmatics. Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. [URL] (Downloaded June 7, 2019).
Kukla, Rebecca & Mark N. Lance. 2009. ‘Yo!’ and ‘lo!’: The pragmatic topography of the space of reasons. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Lefebvre, Martin. 2007. The art of pointing. On Peirce, indexicality, and photographic images. In James Elkins (ed.), Photography theory, 220–244. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2010. De quelques airs de famille: Remarques sur le langage et la ressemblance chez Peirce et Wittgenstein. In Francois Latraverse (ed.), Peirce, Wittgenstein et le pragmatism, 1–22. Paris: L’Harmattan.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Legg, Catherine. 2008. The problem of the essential icon. American Philosophical Quarterly 45(3). 207–232.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2014. Charles Peirce’s limit concept of truth. Philosophy Compass 9(3). 204–213. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Levine, Steven. 2010. Rehabilitating objectivity: Rorty, Brandom, and the New Pragmatism. Canadian Journal of Philosophy 40(4). 567–589. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Millikan, Ruth Garrett. 1990. The myth of the essential indexical. Noûs 241. 723–734. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Morris, Charles. 1938. Foundations of the theory of signs. In Otto Neurath, Rudolf Carnap & Charles Morris (eds.), International encyclopedia of unified science I, 77–138. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Peirce, Charles S. 1885. On the algebra of logic: A contribution to the philosophy of notation. American Journal of Mathematics 7(2–3). 180–196. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Peirce, Charles S. 1992. Essential Peirce, vol. 1: Selected philosophical writings (1867–1893). Eds. Nathan Houser & Christian Kloesel. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
1998. Essential Peirce, vol. 2: Selected philosophical writings (1893–1913). Eds. Nathan Houser & Christian Kloesel. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
1931–58. Collected papers (vol. 1–8). Eds. Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss & Arthur Burks. Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Perry, John. 1979. The problem of the essential indexical. Noûs 131. 3–21. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1997. Indexicals and demonstratives. In Bob Hale & Crispin Wright (eds.), Companion to the philosophy of language, 586–612. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 1998. Indexicals, contexts and unarticulated constituents. In Proceedings of the 1995 CSLI-Amsterdam logic, language and computation conference. Stanford: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Quine, Willard V. O. 1960. Word and object. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Recanati, Francois. 2001. What is said. Synthese 128(1–2). 75–91. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2012. Pragmatic enrichment. In Gillian Russell & Delia Graff Fara (eds.), Routledge companion to the philosophy of language, 67–78. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Reichenbach, Hans. 1947. Elements of symbolic logic. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Rommetveit, Ragnar. 1988. On literacy and the myth of literal meaning. In Roger Säljö (ed.), The written world: Studies in literate thought and action, 13–40. Berlin: Springer. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Russell, Bertrand. 1948. Human knowledge: Its scope and its limits. London: Allen and Unwin.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Stalnaker, Robert. 1970. Pragmatics. Synthese 22(1–2). 272–289. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Swindal, James. 2007. Can a discursive pragmatism guarantee objectivity? Habermas and Brandom on the correctness of norms. Philosophy and Social Criticism 33(1). 113–126. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Tarski, Alfred. 1983. The concept of truth in the languages of the deductive sciences. In Joseph Henry Woodger (trs.), Logic, semantics, metamathematics: Papers from 1923 to 1938, 156–278. Hackett: Indianapolis.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Voss, Stephen & Charles Sayward. 1976. Eternal sentences. Australasian Journal of Philosophy 54(1). 14–23. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Wettstein, Howard. 1986. Has semantics rested on a mistake? The Journal of Philosophy 83(4). 185–209. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue