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Referential Intentions| old_uid | 11426 |
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| title | Referential Intentions |
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| start_date | 2012/05/24 |
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| schedule | 14h30-16h30 |
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| online | no |
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| location_info | salle C |
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| summary | One of the main lessons of the view of language as action (Austin, 1961; Grice, 1967) was that referring to things was not something that words do, but something that people do uttering words. According to this pragmatic view, then, a theory of reference could not be limited to the study of the characteristic features of expressions such as proper names, indexicals, demonstratives and (some uses) of definite descriptions in their relation to the objects they designate; but it should be grounded on an account of our acts of referring; that is, the part of communicative acts which consists in referring to individual things.
Communicative acts are explained in term of the speaker’s communicative plan: a structure of her goals, beliefs and intentions that motivates her communicative behavior. As part of communicative acts, referential acts are subject to the same sort of analysis. In this talk, we will argue that referential intentions are a complex type of Gricean intention that exploits the speaker’s cognitive fix on an object and aims at a hearer’s cognitive fix on that object as the result of the referential act. The GDTPA structure of referential plans (Korta and Perry, 2011) offers an account of the paradigmatic use of names, indexicals, demonstratives and (some uses) of definite descriptions as referential devices.
An immediate consequence of the present picture is that reference assignment is not a matter of just identifying the object the speaker is referring to but to identifying it through the intended cognitive fix on the object. Another consequence of the picture of language as action is that utterances, qua acts, have a variety of contents relative to different things that can be taken as given. |
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| responsibles | Roy, Saint-Germier |
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