Questions tagged [pragmatics]
8 questions
22
votes
7 answers
When are semantically non-hostile expressions equivalent to pragmatically hostile ones?
An example being the phrase "White lives matter" (or even "All lives matter") as a response to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Another example would be: "I'm straight and I'm not ashamed," as a response to the LGBTQ movement.
I personally feel…
Samuel Novelinka
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4
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2 answers
The limits on formal semantics: compositionality, context and truth values
I am a little bit surprised by the principle of composionality in semantics (I'm very new to all of this), which states that the meaning of a complex expression is determined by the meanings of its constituent expressions and the rules used to…
DSP
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4
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4 answers
How would I translate the following statement into higher order logic? Or what book would you recommend to teach myself higher order logic?
"For every liar Sentence, there exists some person for whom the sentence is either self-referential or (purely) negative."
I am a behavior analyst with an undergraduate degree in philosophy and some training in first-order logic. I am interested in…
Preston Campbell
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2
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Do all questions involve presuppositions, or just, "If X, then Y?" questions?
A sense of "every question involves presuppositions" can be gleaned from a definition like:
Belnap and Steel (1976, 5) define a question as presupposing a statement if and only if the truth of the statement is a logically necessary condition for…
Kristian Berry
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2
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4 answers
Can a true sentence be a lie?
My question is simple - can a true statement be a lie - that is, can the pragmatics of use of a true sentence (context, intension, effects, etc) make a true statement into a lie? Intuitively it seems possible, though it also seems to go against the…
Victor S. B. Cova
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1 answer
The Indexicality of "Ask this question?"
I was messing around with liar and similar sentences, and noticed a recurring issue with indexical quarantine with respect to the examples at stake. Meaning that something seemed to "go wrong" when you reformulated these weird sentences (not just…
Kristian Berry
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References regarding pragmatic views of philosophy of worklife
I am looking for references regarding pragmatic views of philosophy of work and worklife.
user1858796
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What is the difference between syntax, semantics and pragmatics?
I would be interested to find more about the way semantics intertwines with pragmatics.
Naturally, I associate semantics with more conventional theories like Russell`s as opposed to Gricean pragmatics.
Could you give a practical example of sentence…
s.dragos
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