Minimalism and Phenomenological Evidence

Abstract

It has been recently argued that the phenomenology of semantic perception casts doubts on Grice’s theory of meaning. I defend the psychological and theoretical plausibility of a form of Gricean minimalism, by setting new boundaries to the semantic-pragmatic distinction. This strategy consists in abandoning the entailment from what is said to what is meant, and advancing a conception of the semantic notion of what is said that departs from speaker-hearers’ intuitions. This proposal has important consequences both concerning the evidence that should be used by philosophers of language when evaluating semantic theories, and the way we should carve up linguistic processing.

Keywords

• Semantics
• pragmatics
• minimalism
• semantic perception
• linguistic processing