This paper considers the implications for philosophy of some recent approaches to pragmatics (with a focus on relevance theory) and makes two main points. First, the widening gap between sentence meaning and speaker’s meaning increasingly brings into question a basic assumption of much philosophy of language: that linguistic semantics provides direct insight into the structure of human thoughts...

Once again, van Fraassen has given us an incredibly rich, learned and profound book that will be studied and argued about for decades to come. The book is about scientific representation, but from the perspective of Bas van Fraassen’s empiricism this means ‘‘representation of the empirical phenomena’’ (1). He is keen to distance himself from the empiricist tradition that would interpret the lat...

To what extent is semiotics an appropriate model for understanding material culture meaning? The answer to this question, of course, depends upon the kinds of semiotics that one is talking about. In our article we argue that Saussurean and post-Saussurean approaches favored by some Postprocessualists are incomplete and advocate an alternative approach inspired by the ‘other father’ of semiotics...

Epistemic modal operators give rise to something very like, but also very unlike, Moore’s paradox. I set out the puzzling phenomena, explain why a standard relational semantics for these operators cannot handle them, and recommend an alternative semantics. A pragmatics appropriate to the semantics is developed and interactions between the semantics, the pragmatics, and the definition of consequ...

Abstract Investigating cooperativity of interlocutors is central in studying pragmatics dialogue. Models conversation that only assume cooperative agents fail to explain the dynamics strategic conversations. Thus, we investigate ability identify non-cooperative while completing a concurrent visual-dialogue task. Within this novel setting, study optimality communication strategies for achieving ...