Bratman, Michael. Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987.

Broome, John. “Normative Practical Reasoning.” 175–193.Aristotelian Society: Supplementary Volume. 2001.

Dancy, Jonathan. Moral Reasons. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993.Darwall, Stephen. Impartial Reason. Ithaca, NY: Cornell

University Press, 1983.Gauthier, David. Morals by Agreement. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1986.Gibbard, Alan. Wise Choices, Apt Feelings. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1992.Hill, Thomas E., Jr. Dignity and Practical Reason. Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University Press, 1992.Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature, edited by D. F.

Norton and M. Norton. New Ed. Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 2000.

Kant, Immanuel. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals,edited by A. Zweig and T. E. Hill, Jr. Translated by A. Zweig.Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

Korsgaard, Christine. “The Normativity of InstrumentalReason.” In Ethics and Practical Reason, edited by GarrettCullity and Berys Gaut. Oxford: Oxford University Press,1997.

Korsgaard, Christine. “Skepticism about Practical Reason.”Journal of Philosophy (1986): 5–25.

McDowell, John. “Are Moral Requirements HypotheticalImperatives?” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume(1978): 13–29.

McDowell, John. “Virtue and Reason.” Monist 62 (1979):331–50.

Nagel, Thomas. The Possibility of Altruism. Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1978.

Parfit, Derek. Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Clarendon Press,1984.

Rawls, John. “Kantian Constructivism in Moral Theory.”Journal of Philosophy 77 (1980): 515–572.

Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 1972.

Raz, Joseph. Practical Reason and Norms. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 1975.

Ross, W. D. Foundations of Ethics. Oxford: Clarendon Press,1939.

Scanlon, Thomas. What We Owe to Each Other. Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1998.

Schmidtz, D. Rational Choice and Moral Agency. Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1995.

Smith, Michael. The Moral Problem. New York: Routledge,1995.

Stocker, Michael. “Desiring the Bad: An Essay in MoralPsychology.” Journal of Philosophy 76 (1979): 738–53.

Velleman, David. “The Possibility of Practical Reason.” Ethics106, No. 4 (1996): 694–726.

Wallace, R. Jay. “How to Argue About Practical Reason.” Mind99 (395) (1990): 355–385.

Wallace, R. Jay. “Normativity, Commitment, and InstrumentalReason.” Philosopher’s Imprint. 1 (3) (2001): 1–26,http://www.philosophersimprint.org/001003.

Wiggins, David. “Deliberation and Practical Reason.” In Essayson Aristotle’s Ethics, edited by A. O. Rorty. Berkeley:University of California Press, 1980.

Williams, Bernard. “Internal and External Reasons.” In MoralLuck: Philosophical Papers, 1973–1980. Cambridge, U.K.:Cambridge University Press, 1981.

Robert N. Johnson (2005)

practical reasonapproaches

See Rationalism in Ethics (Practical ReasonApproaches)

pragmaticismSee Peirce, Charles Sanders; Pragmatism

pragmatics

“Pragmatics” was defined by Charles W. Morris (1938) asthe branch of semiotics that studies the relation of signsto interpreters, in contrast with semantics, which studiesthe relation of signs to designata. In practice, it has oftenbeen treated as a repository for any aspect of utterancemeaning beyond the scope of existing semantic machin-ery, as in the slogan “Pragmatics = meaning minus truthconditions” (Gazdar 1979). There has been some doubtabout whether it is a homogeneous domain (Searle,Kiefer, and Bierwisch 1980).

A more positive view emerges from the work of Her-bert Paul Grice, whose William James Lectures (1967) arefundamental. Grice showed that many aspects of utter-ance meaning traditionally regarded as conventional, orsemantic, could be more explanatorily treated as conver-sational, or pragmatic. For Gricean pragmatists, the cru-cial feature of pragmatic interpretation is its inferentialnature: the hearer is seen as constructing and evaluatinga hypothesis about the communicator’s intentions, based,on the one hand, on the meaning of the sentence uttered,and on the other, on contextual information and generalcommunicative principles that speakers are normallyexpected to observe. (For definition and surveys seeLevinson 1983.)

the semantics-pragmaticsdistinction

In early work, the semantics-pragmatics distinction wasoften seen as coextensive with the distinction betweentruth-conditional and non-truth-conditional meaning

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(Gazdar 1979). On this approach, pragmatics would dealwith a range of disparate phenomena, including (a)Gricean conversational inference, (b) the inferentialrecognition of illocutionary-force, and (c) the conven-tional meanings of illocutionary-force indicators andother non-truth-conditional expressions such as but,please, unfortunately (Recanati 1987). From the cognitivepoint of view, these phenomena have little in common.

Within the cognitive science literature in particular,the semantics-pragmatics distinction is now more gener-ally seen as coextensive with the distinction betweendecoding and inference (or conventional and conversa-tional meaning). On this approach, all conventionalmeaning, both truth-conditional and non-truth-condi-tional, is left to linguistic semantics, and the aim of prag-matic theory is to explain how the gap between sentencemeaning and utterance interpretation is inferentiallybridged. A pragmatic theory of this type is developed inD. Sperber and D. Wilson (1986).

implicature

Grice’s distinction between saying and implicating cross-cuts the semantics-pragmatics distinction as definedabove. For Grice, “what is said” corresponds to the truth-conditional content of an utterance, and “what is impli-cated” is everything communicated that is not part ofwhat is said. Grice saw the truth-conditional content ofan utterance as determined partly by the conventional(semantic) meaning of the sentence uttered, and partly bycontextual (pragmatic) factors governing disambiguationand reference assignment. He saw conventional (seman-tic) implicatures as determined by the meaning of dis-course connectives such as but, moreover and so, andanalyzed them as signaling the performance of higher-order speech acts such as contrasting, adding andexplaining (Grice 1989). An alternative analysis is devel-oped in D. Blakemore (1987).

Among nonconventional (pragmatic) implicatures,the best known are the conversational ones: These arebeliefs that have to be attributed to the speaker in order topreserve the assumption that she was obeying the “coop-erative principle” (with associated maxims of truthfulness,informativeness, relevance, and clarity), in saying what shesaid. In Grice’s framework, generalized conversationalimplicatures are “normally” carried by use of a certainexpression, and are easily confused with conventional lex-ical meaning (Grice 1989). In Grice’s view, many earlierphilosophical analyses were guilty of such confusion.

Grice’s account of conversational implicatures hasbeen questioned on several grounds:

(1) The status and content of the cooperative princi-ple and maxims have been debated, and attemptsto reduce the maxims or provide alternativesources for implicatures have been undertaken(Davis 1991, Horn 1984, Levinson 1987, Sperberand Wilson 1986).

(2) Grice claimed that deliberate, blatant maxim-vio-lation could result in implicatures, in the case ofmetaphor and irony in particular. This claim hasbeen challenged, and alternative accounts ofmetaphor and irony developed, in which nomaxim-violation takes place (Blakemore 1992,Hugly and Sayward 1979, Sperber and Wilson1986).

(3) Pragmatic principles have been found to make asubstantial contribution to explicit communica-tion, not only in disambiguation and referenceassignment, but in enriching the linguisticallyencoded meaning in various ways. This raises thequestion of where the borderline between explicitand implicit communication should be drawn(Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1995). It has even beenargued that many of Grice’s best-known cases ofgeneralized conversational implicature might bebetter analyzed as pragmatically determinedaspects of what is said (Carston 1988, Recanati1989).

(4) The idea that the context for utterance interpreta-tion is determined in advance of the utterance hasbeen questioned, and the identification of anappropriate set of contextual assumptions is nowseen as an integral part of the utterance-interpre-tation process (Blakemore 1992, Sperber and Wil-son 1986).

prospects

Within the cognitive science literature, severalapproaches to pragmatics are currently being pursued.There are computational attempts to implement theGricean program via rules for the recognition of coher-ence relations among discourse segments (Asher and Las-carides 1995, Hobbs 1985). Relations between theGricean program and speech-act theory are beingreassessed (Tsohatzidis 1994). The cognitive foundationsof pragmatics and the relations of pragmatics to neigh-boring disciplines are still being explored (Sperber andWilson 1995, Sperber 1994). Despite this diversity ofapproaches, pragmatics now seems to be established as arelatively homogenous domain.

PRAGMATICS

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See also Cognitive Science; Grice, Herbert Paul; Metaphor;Philosophy of Language; Reference; Semantics.

B i b l i o g r a p h yAsher, N., and A. Lascarides. “Lexical Disambiguation in a

Discourse Context.” Journal of Semantics 12 (1995): 69–108.

Blakemore, D. Semantic Constraints on Relevance. Oxford:Blackwell, 1987.

Blakemore, D. Understanding Utterances. Oxford: Blackwell,1992.

Carston, R. “Explicature, Implicature and Truth-TheoreticSemantics.” In Mental Representations: The Interface betweenLanguage and Reality, edited by R. Kempson. Cambridge,U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

Davis, S., ed. Pragmatics: A Reader. New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1991.

Gazdar, G. Pragmatics: Implicature, Presupposition and LogicalForm. New York: Academic Press, 1979.

Grice, H. P. “Logic and Conversation.” William James Lectures.Cambridge, MA, 1967.

Grice, H. P. Studies in the Way of Words. Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1989.

Hobbs, J. “On the Coherence and Structure of Discourse.”Center for the Study of Language and Information (October1985).

Horn, L. “A New Taxonomy for Pragmatic Inference: Q-Basedand R-Based Implicature.” In Meaning, Form and Use inContext, edited by D. Schiffrin. Washington, DC, 1984.

Hugly, P., and C. Sayward. “A Problem about ConversationalImplicature.” Linguistics and Philosophy 3 (1979): 19–25.

Levinson, S. “Minimization and Conversational Inference.” InThe Pragmatic Perspective, edited by J. Verschueren and M.Bertuccelli-Papis. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1987.

Levinson, S. Pragmatics. Cambridge, U.K.: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1983.

Morris, C. “Foundations of the Theory of Signs.” InInternational Encyclopedia of Unified Science, edited by O.Neurath, R. Carnap, and C. Morriss. Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1938.

Recanati, F. Meaning and Force. Cambridge, U.K.: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1987.

Recanati, F. “The Pragmatics of What Is Said.” Mind andLanguage 4 (1989): 295–329.

Searle, J., F. Kiefer, and M. Bierwisch, eds. Speech-Act Theoryand Pragmatics. Dordrecht: Reidel, 1980.

Sperber, D. “Understanding Verbal Understanding.” In What IsIntelligence?, edited by J. Khalfa. Cambridge, U.K.:Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Sperber, D., and D. Wilson. Relevance: Communication andCognition. Oxford, 1986.

Sperber, D., and D. Wilson. “Postface” to the second edition ofRelevance. Oxford, 1995.

Tsohatzidis, S., ed. Foundations of Speech-Act Theory:Philosophical and Linguistic Perspectives. London: Routledge,1994.

Deirdre Wilson (1996)

pragmatics[addendum]

A major focus of post-Gricean pragmatics is the role thatpragmatic inference plays in determining the explicitcontent of utterances (as opposed to their conversationalimplicatures). As well as disambiguation and referencefixing, there are pragmatic processes of propositionalcompletion, as in the examples in (1), and, more contro-versially, processes of “free” enrichment, as in (2):

The pragmatic completions in (1) are mandated byaspects of the linguistic semantics of the sentences,specifically by the lexical items too and better. However,this does not seem to be the case for the examples in (2),which express complete, truth-evaluable propositionswithout the bracketed addition. These pragmatic infer-ences seem to be entirely pragmatically motivated (i.e.,“free” from linguistic indication); they are undertaken inorder to satisfy standing communicative presumptionsconcerning the informativeness and relevance of utter-ances. For instance, (2a) is strictly speaking true providedthe speaker has had breakfast sometime in her life, but inmost contexts a speaker intends a more specific proposi-tion and relevant implications hinge on the enriched con-tent (e.g., “that she is not hungry at this moment”).Another kind of free pragmatic process is “lexical modu-lation”: the encoded meaning of a word may be narroweddown in context (e.g., drink used to mean “alcoholicdrink”), broadened (e.g., square used to mean “squarish”)or metaphorically extended (e.g., nightmare used to mean“unpleasant experience”).

The view that “free” pragmatic inferences can affectexplicit content in these ways is labeled “truth-condi-tional pragmatics” and is held by pragmatists across dif-ferent theoretical persuasions. Various accounts of thephenomenon and its relation to conversational implica-ture are being developed. Stephen Levinson (2000) arguesfor a system of “default” pragmatic inferences triggered byparticular linguistic forms (e.g., and, some, drink), whichare distinct from the kind of inferences responsible formore context-specific implicatures. François Recanati(2003) makes a different distinction between two kinds ofpragmatic processes: “primary” processes, such as freeenrichment, which contribute to truth-conditional con-

[for what?]

[than what?]

[today]

[causal relation]

It’s too late.

Cotton is better.

I’ve had breakfast.

John’s car hit Tom’s andTom stopped illegally.

a.

b.

a.

b.

(1)

(2)

PRAGMATICS [ADDENDUM]

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