It seems to me that there is a really interesting interplay of different forces here, which we don’t yet know how to model well.
Even if Alice tries meticulously to only say literally true things, and be precise about her meanings, Bob can and should infer more than what Alice has literally said, by working backwards to infer why she has said it rather than something else.
So, pragmatics is inevitable, and we’d be fools not to take advantage of it.
However, we also really like transparent contexts—that is, we like to be able to substitute phrases for equivalent phrases (equational reasoning, like algebra), and make inferences based on substitution-based reasoning (if all bachelors are single, and Jerry is a bachelor, then Jerry is single).
To put it simply, things are easier when words have context-independent meanings (or more realistically, meanings which are valid across a wide array of contexts, although nothing will be totally context-independent).
This puts contradictory pressure on language. Pragmatics puts pressure towards highly context-dependent meaning; reasoning puts pressure towards highly context-independent meaning.
If someone argues a point by conflation (uses a word in two different senses, but makes an inference as if the word had one sense) then we tend to fault using the same word in two different senses, rather than fault basic reasoning patterns like transitivity of implication (A implies B, and B implies C, so A implies C). Why is that? Is that the correct choice? If meanings are inevitably context-dependent anyway, why not give up on reasoning? ;p
It seems to me that there is a really interesting interplay of different forces here, which we don’t yet know how to model well.
Even if Alice tries meticulously to only say literally true things, and be precise about her meanings, Bob can and should infer more than what Alice has literally said, by working backwards to infer why she has said it rather than something else.
So, pragmatics is inevitable, and we’d be fools not to take advantage of it.
However, we also really like transparent contexts—that is, we like to be able to substitute phrases for equivalent phrases (equational reasoning, like algebra), and make inferences based on substitution-based reasoning (if all bachelors are single, and Jerry is a bachelor, then Jerry is single).
To put it simply, things are easier when words have context-independent meanings (or more realistically, meanings which are valid across a wide array of contexts, although nothing will be totally context-independent).
This puts contradictory pressure on language. Pragmatics puts pressure towards highly context-dependent meaning; reasoning puts pressure towards highly context-independent meaning.
If someone argues a point by conflation (uses a word in two different senses, but makes an inference as if the word had one sense) then we tend to fault using the same word in two different senses, rather than fault basic reasoning patterns like transitivity of implication (A implies B, and B implies C, so A implies C). Why is that? Is that the correct choice? If meanings are inevitably context-dependent anyway, why not give up on reasoning? ;p