When a diplomat says yes, he means ‘perhaps’;
When he says perhaps, he means ‘no’;
When he says no, he is not a diplomat.
—Voltaire (Quoted, in Spanish, in Escandell 1993.)
Pragmatics deals with utterances, by which we will mean specific events,
the intentional acts of speakers at times and places, typically involving
language. Logic and semantics traditionally deal with properties of types
of expressions, and not with properties that differ from token to token,
or use to use, or, as we shall say, from utterance to utterance, and vary
with the particular properties that differentiate them. Pragmatics is
sometimes characterized as dealing with the effects of context. This is
equivalent to saying it deals with utterances, if one collectively refers
to all the facts that can vary from utterance to utterance as ‘context.’
One must be careful, however, for the term is often used with more limited
meanings. Different theorists have focused on different properties of
utterances.
To discuss them it will be helpful to make a distinction
between
‘near-side pragmatics’ and
‘far-side pragmatics.’ The
picture is this. The utterances philosophers usually take as paradigmatic
are assertive uses of declarative sentences, where the speaker says
something. Near-side pragmatics is concerned with the nature of certain
facts that are relevant to determining what is said. Far-side pragmatics
is focused on what happens beyond saying: what speech acts are performed
in or by saying what is said, or what implicatures are generated by saying
what is said.
Learn more on Standford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
This page was built by Taravat Yazdani.