Confusion of the Metaphysics of Meaning with the Epistemology of Interpretation

Abstract

This confusion is the Second Methodological Flaw of Linguistic Pragmatism. There is an obvious difference between the study of the properties of utterances – what is said and what is meant – and the study of how hearers interpret utterances. We might say that the former study is concerned with the metaphysics of meaning, the latter, with the epistemology of interpretation. Yet confusion of these two studies is almost ubiquitous in the pragmatics literature. Pragmatists think that what is said is semantically underdetermined and, as Carston says, believe that “pragmatic inference (that is, maxim-guided inference) is required to make up the shortfall”. This is the confusion. If there were a shortfall, it would be made up by something non-inferential that the speaker has in mind. Elugardo and Stainton acknowledge the distinction between metaphysical (constitutive) and epistemic determination but then surprisingly claim that it does no “undue harm sometimes to ignore the distinction in practice”; doing so is not a “mere confusion”; the topics are “inextricably linked”. I argue that their reasons for thinking this are flawed. (A) At most they demonstrate an evidential impact of epistemic on metaphysical determination. (B) There is no reason to believe that what a hearer can figure out about what is asserted/stated/said provides evidence of what could be a metaphysical determinant of what is asserted/stated/said. Ignoring the distinction between the metaphysical and the epistemological wrongly encourages the idea that meanings are pragmatically constituted.