WHY IS TRUTH THE MISSING LINK IN PRAGMATICS?

AUTHOR(S) / AUTOR(I): Jacques Moeschler

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.46793/BeyondFront.037M

ABSTRACT / SAŽETAK:

This paper is about truth and pragmatics, and tries to explain why truth, a functional relationship between language and the world, has been systematically dismissed in pragmatics, whether in speech act theory, Gricean, neo-Gricean, or post-Gricean pragmatics. While truth value plays a crucial role in Relevance Theory in the pragmatic computation of what is said (explicature), its role in the overall comprehension process is underestimated. In other words, whereas truth is a property of utterance, which is a necessary condition for accessing explicit meaning, it is not what utterances are about, that is, positive contextual effects that are relevance-driven and not truth-driven. In a word, what a hearer is looking for in a communicative process is an increase in relevance, not an access to truth.

This paper challenges this conclusion by assuming that the truth-conditional assessment of an utterance is not only a necessary step for inferential processes: it is also primarily responsible for making the acceptance of what is communicated possible. In other words, an inferential process does not stop when it accesses a contextual implication: it stops when its truth value has been established.

The main consequence of this assumption is that communication is viewed in a new and different perspective from the one that is classically assigned to the computation of implicatures: a complete interpretation of an utterance implies the assessment of the speaker’s reliability by adding the inferred conclusion to the common ground of the conversation. New issues are then assigned to pragmatics: reputation, reliability, trust, and confidence are crucial concepts for successful communication. If this is true, a new challenge arises: what about ignorance and doubt? What happens when a knowledge gap arises between the communicator and her audience? This issue directly impacts the semantics-pragmatics interface, and will be approached in the conclusion.

KEYWORDS / KLJUČNE REČI:

Implicature, presupposition, truth, reliability, trust, ignorance, doubt, semantics-pragmatics interface

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT / PROJEKAT:

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