Abstract
One of the liveliest philosophical debates in recent years concerns the nature of the semantics/pragmatics divide. Some writers have expressed worries that it might be merely terminological, but I think it ultimately concerns an issue with empirical implications: the scope and limits of a serious scientific undertaking, formal semantics. Richard Montague (1973), the inaugurator of that research tradition who showed that tools developed in mathematical logic can be helpfully deployed to explain features of natural languages, paradoxically thought of semantics as a branch of mathematics. However, most of his contemporary followers are as convinced as their colleagues in other fields in linguistics that their theoretical proposals must eventually be integrated with results in cognitive neuroscience.1 It is whether or not there is an explanatorily interesting subject matter at all for this research undertaking roughly within the contours envisaged by its practitioners — a subject matter for a theoretical account with such empirical consequences — that in my view the debate ultimately concerns.
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García-Carpintero, M. (2010). Linguistic Meaning and Propositional Content. In: Soria, B., Romero, E. (eds) Explicit Communication. Palgrave Studies in Pragmatics, Language and Cognition. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230292352_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230292352_5
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