This essay ties together some main strands of the author’s research spanning the last quarter-century. Because of its broad scope and space limitations, he prescinds from detailed arguments and instead intuitively motivates the general points which are supported more fully in other publications to which he provides references. After an initial delineation of several distinct notions of meaning, the author considers such a notion deriving from the evolutionary biology of communication that he terms ‘organic meaning’, and places it in the (...) context of evolutionary game theory. That provides a framework for a special type of organic meaning found in the phenomenon of expression, of which the author here offers an updated characterization while highlighting its wide philosophical interest. Expression in turn generalizes to a paradigmatic form of human communication—conversation—and section 4 provides a taxonomy of conversation-types while arguing that attention to such types helps to sharpen predictions of what speakers say rather than conversationally implicate. We close with a view of fictional discourse on which authors of fictional works are engaged in conversation with their readers, and can provide them with knowledge in spite of the fictional character of their conversation. Such knowledge includes knowledge of how an emotion feels and is thus a route to empathy. (shrink)

W artykule przedstawiamy model ironii komunikacyjnej sformułowany w ramach teorii aktów mowy. Twierdzimy, że akty ironii werbalnej stanowią szczególne przypadki zjawisk, które John L. Austin określał mianem etiolacji językowej. Po omó- wieniu pojęcia ironii komunikacyjnej rozumianego w duchu Mitchella S. Greena modelu komunikacji ekspresywnej, proponujemy rozwinięcie Austinowskiej idei etiolacji i pokazujemy, jak przypadki etiolacyjnego zastosowania języka pasożytują na mechanizmach jego poważnych lub zwykłych zastosowań. W szczególności argumentujemy, że przywołanie echem oraz jawne udawanie są dwoma technikami etiolacji, które umożliwiają nadawcy ekspresję (...) negatywnego nastawiania do kontekstowo dostępnych reprezentacji mentalnych lub językowych. Pokazujemy też, że proponowany model pozawala na wyjaśnienie werbalnych form ironii komunikacyjnej. (shrink)

In the article we present a model of communicative irony formulated within the framework of speech act theory. We claim that acts of verbal irony are special cases of phenomena that John L. Austin referred to as “etiolations of language”. After discussing the concept of communicative irony understood in the spirit of Mitchell S. Green’s expressive communication model, we propose to develop the Austinian idea of etiolation and show how cases of etiolative use of language parasitize the mechanisms of its (...) serious or ordinary applications. In particular, we argue that echoing and overt pretence are two etiolation techniques that allow the sender to express a negative attitude towards contextually available mental or linguistic representations. We also show that the proposed model allows the explanation of verbal forms of communicative irony. (shrink)

1. On at least one usage of ‘mean’, performing an action that leads someone else to think that P, is not, on its own, sufficient for meaning that P. Nor is performing an action that is intended to get someone to think this. Instead one must make one’s intention overt. Grice’s way of developing this overtness requirement requires audience-directed intentions: for an agent, on this approach, to mean that P, she must perform a publicly accessible action with the intention of (...) producing in an addressee the belief that P, while further intending that her addressee enter that state at least in part by recognition of her intention. 11 Different types of intended cognitive state and content correspond to different illocutionary forces. Thus an imperatival utterance might be made with the aim of producing an intention to do something; and one might mean P as a conjecture rather than as an assertion by intending to produce in an addressee not a belief but some less committal cognitive state such as tentative acceptance. (shrink)

Irony and sarcasm are two quite different, sometimes morally dubious, linguistic tropes. We can draw a distinction between them if we identify irony as a speech act that calls what is bad good and, correspondingly, sarcasm calls good bad. This allows us to ask, which one is morally worse. My argument is based on the idea that the speaker can legitimately bypass what is good and call it bad, which is to say that she may literally mean what she says. (...) This is not true of the opposite case: one cannot bypass what is bad and, therefore, she paradoxically does not mean what she says. In other words, irony is a morally less guilty trope. What is bad has its faults and thus it can be ironized; what is good is without blemish and thus it is difficult to know how it could be called bad. Also, irony can be freely intended, or verbal, or it can be situational in social context. I also discuss dramatic irony in Classical context. Sarcasm does not allow such complexity. Instead, we speak of cynicism and even nihilism as moral attitudes that accompany sarcasm and give it its typical force; or sarcasm may lead to cynicism and nihilism, that is, to the denial of values. Irony does not entail any corresponding attitudes or moral positions. This paper is a philosophical contribution to the ethics of communication and language. (shrink)