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What Can Pragmatics Learn from the Law? (On Recanati’s Cases of Modulation, Indirect Reporting, and Cancellability of Explicatures)

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Interdisciplinary Studies in Pragmatics, Culture and Society

Part of the book series: Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology ((PEPRPHPS,volume 4))

Abstract

This chapter is a contribution to societal pragmatics, as intended (and defended) by Jacob L. Mey (Pragmatics. An introduction. Oxford, Blackwell, 2001). The approach to this chapter is mainly Wittgensteinian as I am interested in conditions of use and how these can have effects on pragmatic inferences. By investigating the law and pragmatics, I end up with a radical Wittgensteinian conception of what the language game of modulation is. When the term of art ‘modulation’ was introduced by Recanati (Literal meaning. Cambridge, CUP, 2004), it was merely thought of as a pragmatic inference and not as a language game. I will explain, after the application of pragmatics and the law to the concept of modulation, how it can come about that modulation can be considered a language game. In this chapter, I also reconsider indirect reporting as a societal practice, and I expatiate on reporting rules or rule-based decisions. I finish the chapter by briefly reconsidering cancellability of explicatures.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The literature on intentionality is wide, starting from the canonical Gricean texts. However, this paper was greatly influenced by the Wittgensteinian considerations in Cimatti (1999), which I adapted to the purpose of this chapter.

  2. 2.

    I found a case of triple negation in Evans’ (1982) ‘The varieties of reference’.

  3. 3.

    Perry (2013) provides interesting considerations on the cruelty of keeping people in prisons for long periods of time. His discussion is interesting and mingles with linguistic considerations on implicit arguments, because for him an important aspect of understanding ‘cruel’ is saturation of the variable in the implicit structure ‘cruel at t’. Clearly, different results can be obtained if t is the time of the constitution or if t is the time (any time) of subsequent readings. In Perry’s discussion of original meanings, it is important that the applications of the concept ‘cruel’ be seen in the context of the person or society who applies the concept. I think this paper fully exploits the consequences of Perry’s extremely interesting ideas. (The paper by Greenberg and Litman, important as it is, does not contain the linguistic suggestions that should be taken into account in applying their theory. Their theory can only work if the linguistic considerations by Perry are accepted.)

  4. 4.

    I am indebted to Perry (2013) for this view of language in legal texts. I then extended the analogy to ordinary language.

  5. 5.

    I think a similar treatment can be found in Oscar Wilde’s use of ‘student’ in ‘The Happy Prince’.

  6. 6.

    This has been adapted from The Blue Book, 5:

    5. All the questions considered here link up with this problem: Suppose you had taught someone to write down series of numbers according to rules of the form: Always write down a number n greater than the preceding. (This rule is abbreviated to ‘Add n’.) The numerals in this game are to be groups of dashes |, ||, |||, etc. What I call teaching this game, of course, consisted in giving general explanations and doing examples—these examples are taken from the range, say, between 1 and 85. We now give the pupil the order ‘Add 1’. After some time we observe that after passing 100, he did what we should call adding 2; after passing 300, he does what we should call adding 3. We have him up for this: ‘Didn't I tell you always to add 1? Look what you have done before you got to 100!’–Suppose the pupil said, pointing to the numbers 102, 104, etc., ‘Well, didn't I do the same here? I thought this was what you wanted me to do.’–You see that it would get us no further here again to say ‘But don’t you see…?’, pointing out to him again the rules and examples we had given to him. We might, in such a case, say that this person naturally understands (interprets) the rule (and examples) we have given as we should understand the rule (and examples) telling us: ‘Add 1 up to 100, then 2 up to 200, etc.’

    It seems to me that Wittgenstein is pointing out that there is some under-determined meaning in the rule of use instantiated in the series taught by the teacher. So, presumably, in learning rules of use, there are many ways we could understand them, and part of mastering a rule is to understand how it can deal with new cases or new contexts. Of course the problem to solve is how people get the rules of use in correct ways.

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Acknowledgment

I would like to give warm thanks to Dr. Eleni Gregoromichelaki who kindly offered to help me in a number of ways. This help has resulted in a much better paper. I am also grateful to the following for feedback: Jim Higginbotham, Wayne Davis, Yan Huang, Jacob Mey, Istvan Kecskes, Louise Cummings, and Kasia Jaszczolt.

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  1. University of Messina, Messina, Italy

    Alessandro Capone

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  1. University of Messina, Messina, Italy

    Alessandro Capone

  2. Dept. of Lang & Communication, University of Southern Denmark, Odense M, Denmark

    Jacob L. Mey

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Capone, A. (2016). What Can Pragmatics Learn from the Law? (On Recanati’s Cases of Modulation, Indirect Reporting, and Cancellability of Explicatures). In: Capone, A., Mey, J. (eds) Interdisciplinary Studies in Pragmatics, Culture and Society. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, vol 4. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12616-6_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12616-6_14

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