On December 2021, The Language, Action and Thought (LAT) research group and the Institute for Logic, Cognition, Language and Information (ILCLI) at the University of the Basque Country organized an online workshop to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Critical Pragmatics, written by Kepa Korta and John Perry in 2011—you can visit the workshop’s webpage here. We received some very interesting proposals at the open Call for Abstracts of the Workshop, and the presentations at the conference were lively and provocative, inspiring productive and thoughtful dialogue. They covered a wide range of topics and areas, offering a critical re-evaluation of the contributions made in CP, and developing the main tenets defended in CP to approach different issues in the frontier of semantics and pragmatics. Hence, we decided that it was a wonderful opportunity to ask participants to contribute papers based on their presentations to a collective volume on Critical Pragmatics.

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The result, a special issue of the journal Topoi (A Critical Eye on Critical Pragmatics: Issues at the Frontier of Semantics and Pragmatics), is soon to be published. The special issue has been edited by Chris Genovesi and Ekain Garmendia, and the “online first” versions of the articles to be published can be found here.

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The special issue collects five original articles, some of them based on talks given in the 2021 Workshop, others received through an open call for papers. The issue opens with “Critical Pragmatics: Nine Misconceptions”, written by María de Ponte (ILCLI - University of the Basque Country), Kepa Korta (ILCLI - University of the Basque Country) and John Perry (CSLI - Stanford). There, some common misconceptions about CP are introduced and clarified. Some of such misconceptions are due to the very name given to both, the book and the theory defended in it (namely, “Critical Pragmatics”), others due to misunderstandings concerning the Critical Referentialism developed by Perry in Reference and Reflexivity; some are quite substantial, others not as much (but, nevertheless, repetitive and therefore annoying). In the paper, de Ponte, Korta and Perry introduce nine of such misconceptions and clarify them.

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The second and third articles concern some kinds of “empty names”. The second article, “Critical Pragmatics on Fictional Names. Some Problems concerning Network Content” is written by Eleonora Orlando (IIF - SADAF - CONICET). Orlando explores the prospects of “Network Content”, a level of content identified by Korta and Perry in Critial Pragmatics, for dealing with fictional names like “Holmes”. The second article, “Vulcan is a Hot Mess: The Dilemma of Mythical Names and Cococo-Reference” is by Lenny Clapp (Northern Illinois University). Clapp distinguishes between fictional names (like “Holmes”) and mythical names (like “Vulcan”), and argues that the notion of coco-reference, used by Korta and Perry in order to account for different kinds of empty names, has its problems when it comes to mythical names. Clapp introduces the notion of cococo-reference, and explains how it can be used to offer an account of mythical namee.

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The fourth article, “The Name-Notion Network: On how to Conciliate Two Approaches to Naming and Reference-Fixing”, is written by Eros Corazza (ILCLI - Ikerbasque - Carleton). Corazza makes use of the Name-Notion Networks identified in CP, and the levels of content that may be stipulated by appealing to them, in order to solve a dilemma that may be presented when discussing the works of Keith Donnellan and Saul Kripke on naming and reference fixing. Last, the special issue closes with an article by Chris Genovesi (LAT - Concordia U): “A Critical Pragmatic Account of Prosaic and Poetic Metaphors”. In it, Genovesi makes use of the different levels of content of an utterance identified in CP, in order to account for interpretations across the poetic-prosaic spectrum of metaphors.