Online workshop
15th - 17th December 2021
The Language, Action and Thought (LAT) group at the Institute for Logic, Cognition, Language, and Information (ILCLI) has organized a workshop in celebration of the 10th anniversary of Critical Pragmatics (CP). This witty and elegant book is the result of the creative and collaborative exchanges over a number of years between Kepa Korta and John Perry (KP). The ideas in the book provide important insights into the received framework of pragmatics. One of the guiding ideas, following Austin and Grice, is that language is action whereby intentions and beliefs take centre stage. KP claim that although Austin and Grice vindicated pragmatics from the classic code model, remnants of it remain fully intact. For example, the authors observe that it is commonplace in action theory to distinguish a plurality of contents for an act—the things that one does. In pragmatic research, there is a tendency to take utterances to have a single truth conditional content—the thing that is said (Korta & Perry, 2011, xii). We can refer to this tendency as the ‘dogma of mono-propositionalism’. KP are pluralists of content, and accordingly treat utterances (and information-carrying events) as involving different levels of contents from minimal utterance-bound content to ordinary referential content. By acknowledging the various contents associated with an utterance, CP carves out a unique and comprehensive framework which is semantically minimalist and pragmatically contextualist.
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Over the last ten years, the book and the ideas therein continue to be a driving force in research, inspiring a wide audience working in diverse areas, including but not limited to action and communication, rhetoric, pragmatics and semantics and touches upon issues including but not limited to fiction, non-literal uses of language, unarticulated constituents, and reference.
Special issue of Topoi
