Converging towards what?Pragmatic and Semantic Competence

CRR '05 Workshop on Context Representation and Reasoning

Carlo Penco ; Massimiliano Vignolo

Others  :  http://CEUR-WS.org/Vol-136/300.pdf
PID  :  4079

来源: CEUR

【 摘 要 】

The paper tries to build a bridge between results in commonsense reasoning and inferential theories of meaning. We focus on the problem of communication and the contrast between two views of communication, the “expressive” view and the “convergence” view. According to the convergence view (and local holism which supports it) the meaning of a sentence is the set of inferences to which speakers converge in a discourse context. The problem is that we have no idea about the strategy of this convergence, even if it is apparent that the convergence of inferences depends on contextual clues and pragmatic factors. We claim that in order to accept the convergence view we need to supplement the idea of meaning as inference with recent results in multi-context theories. Our solution to the problem is based on a distinction between semantic competence and contextual competence defined as rulegoverned pragmatic competence.