I suppose I didn’t draw out the critical implication I’m trying to point to:
If you buy my argument that, far from ignoring semantics vs pragmatics, your way of framing the problem relies critically on the distinction...
...then you should be more curious about what is going on with the distinction, rather than writing it off as a less important detail to be figured out later.
I take pragmatics to be easy to understand (so long as we take it to include semantics, rather than be exclusive): the pragmatics of an utterance is just what a Bayesian listener would infer from it. (We can, if we like, also point to the pragmatic intent: what the speaker was trying to get the listener to infer.)
What seems hard is, how do we point out only the semantic content, when in conversation we always need to think about the full pragmatics?
Why do we even believe that utterances have literal content, rather than only a cloud of probabilistic implications? How could such a belief be grounded in linguistic behavior, aside from the brute fact that people talk about this distinction as if it is a thing? What singles out some inferences as semantic? What makes those inferences different from other pragmatic inferences?
It seems like it has something to do with always-valid inferences vs context-sensitive inferences, for one thing.
I suppose I didn’t draw out the critical implication I’m trying to point to:
If you buy my argument that, far from ignoring semantics vs pragmatics, your way of framing the problem relies critically on the distinction...
...then you should be more curious about what is going on with the distinction, rather than writing it off as a less important detail to be figured out later.
I take pragmatics to be easy to understand (so long as we take it to include semantics, rather than be exclusive): the pragmatics of an utterance is just what a Bayesian listener would infer from it. (We can, if we like, also point to the pragmatic intent: what the speaker was trying to get the listener to infer.)
What seems hard is, how do we point out only the semantic content, when in conversation we always need to think about the full pragmatics?
Why do we even believe that utterances have literal content, rather than only a cloud of probabilistic implications? How could such a belief be grounded in linguistic behavior, aside from the brute fact that people talk about this distinction as if it is a thing? What singles out some inferences as semantic? What makes those inferences different from other pragmatic inferences?
It seems like it has something to do with always-valid inferences vs context-sensitive inferences, for one thing.