Logic in Pragmatics*

This paper argues against the complete elimination of logical introduction rules from the pragmatic inference system. To maintain the consistency of the inference system as a whole, which is meant to support one’s truth-based judgment over propositions, the inference system should have access to both introduction and elimination rules. I show that the inclusion of introduction rules in the pragmatic inference system neither overgenerates propositions expressed nor cause non-terminating inference steps. 1 Free enrichment and alleged overgeneration According to Relevance Theory (RT for short, Sperber & Wilson 1986/95), reference assignment and disambiguation are not the only pragmatic processes involved in the recovery of propositions expressed by (or the truth-conditional content of) utterances. (1) a. Every presenter [in the pragmatics session of CamLING07] was impressive. b. John took out a key and opened the door [with the key]. Cf. Hall (2006) RT assumes that, given the linguistically provided information outside the square brackets in (1), the hearer can pragmatically add the contents given in the brackets when she recovers the proposition expressed (in appropriate contexts). * I am grateful to Robyn Carston, Nicholas Allott and Alison Hall for reading (part of) drafts and making suggestions. They do not necessarily agree with the final version and all the mistakes and misconceptions in this paper are the author’s. 1 More accurately, given the linguistic meaning outside the square brackets in (1) which the hearer can recover by decoding the semantic information encoded with the language expressions that the speaker used in the utterance, and given the context in which the utterance was made (which includes the speaker’s intention), the hearer can pragmatically enrich to the truthconditional content of the utterance which includes the pragmatically added contents inside the square brackets in (1). Crucially, the hearer may enrich the meaning of an expression before she recovers the encoded meanings of the other expressions. For more details about free enrichment, see Carston (2002).