Abstract
ABSTRACT The Reflexive-Referential Theory is a multi-content approach to utterance interpretation. Its main proponent, John Perry, assumes that utterances of sentences with singular terms express several contents, depending on how their utterers and interpreters harness information from the situations in which they are produced. However, the theory says little to nothing about implied content, like presuppositions. Here, I discuss the possibility of including presuppositions, defined in terms of the concept of not-at-issue content, in this view. I begin with a brief characterization of the Reflexive-Referential theory in what regards its theoretical motivations and main thesis, followed by a study case of presuppositional not-at-issue content associated to a specific class of singular terms, proper names. To conclude, I ponder over a few consequences of this overall project of theoretical expansion.
Highlights
Perry (2001) tackles two objections to Referentialism: 1) the problem of coreference, concerning the cognitive significance of coreferential terms; and 2) the problem of no-reference, that is, accounting for the meaningfulness of singular terms that fail to refer1
As we will see it accounts for content individuation and cognitive significance – which arise from the objection in 1), without compromising central tenets of the position, such as direct reference
I tried to show here that, because RRT seeks to defend Referentialism from important objections as well as to preserve a cognitive constraint on semantics, it leaves out some nuances in what concerns kinds of content
Summary
Perry (2001) tackles two objections to Referentialism: 1) the problem of coreference, concerning the cognitive significance of coreferential terms; and 2) the problem of no-reference, that is, accounting for the meaningfulness of singular terms that fail to refer. One of them is the singular proposition expressed or the referential content of the utterance, of which the referent is a constituent Another one is the reflexive content, which carries information purely from linguistic conventions and the production of the token; and, incremented reflexive content, which contains partial information about the referent, but is still essentially about the utterance itself. According to a recent trend in pragmatic studies, originally proponed by Craige Roberts (1996), assertions express truth-conditional content, like referential or reflexive, and implied content with a regulative function on conversations. Defenders of this new framework call it not-at-issue content.
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