Cover not available
Article published In:
New Developments in Relevance Theory
Edited by Manuel Padilla Cruz and Agnieszka Piskorska
[Pragmatics & Cognition 28:2] 2021
► pp. 416–440

Why truth matters

When relevance meets truthfulness

| University of Geneva
This article is about truth and relevance. It first discusses the concept of truth in formal semantics and pragmatics, mainly the Gricean, neo-Gricean and post-Gricean approaches to meaning. What is particularly crucial is the relationship between pragmatic meaning and truth, since, from a Gricean perspective, meaning is defined as non-truth-conditional, which in turn raises the question of how truth can be a pragmatic issue. A second issue is the relationship between truth and relevance, as developed in relevance theory. A third key point is how truth matters as regards the common ground. In order to illustrate how truth is connected to the common ground, bullshit, post-truth, fake news and lies are discussed, which raise the issue of how truth can be defeated in verbal communication, and mainly how false assumptions can be entertained as true.
Keywords: truth, relevance, meaning, communication, common ground
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Truth and meaning
  • 3.Truth in Gricean and neo-Gricean pragmatics
  • 4.Relevance and truth in communication
  • 5.Truth and the common ground
  • 6.The defeat of truth in verbal communication
  • 7.What does the common ground consist of?
  • 8.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgement
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 27 June 2022
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pc.21012.moe
References (51)
References
Austin, John L. 1962. How to do things with words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Bach, Emmon. 1989. Informal lectures on formal semantics. New York: SUNY Press.Google Scholar
Beaver, David. 2021. Two minutes hate. Plenary lecture delivered at the 17th International Pragmatics Conference. Winterthur: 2 July 2021.
Beaver, David & Jason Stanley. Forthcoming. Hustle: The politics of language. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Blackburn, Simon. 2017. Truth. London: Profile Books.Google Scholar
Carston, Robyn. 2002. Utterances and thought: The pragmatics of explicit communication. Oxford: Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Changeux, Jean-Pierre. 2002. L’homme de vérité. Paris: Odile Jacob.Google Scholar
. 2004. The physiology of truth: Neuroscience and human knowledge. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University press.Google Scholar
Cohen, L. Jonathan. 1971. Some remarks on Grice’s view about the logical particles of natural language. In Yehoshua Bar-Hillel (ed.), Pragmatics of natural language, 50–68. Dordrecht: Reidel. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dowty, David, Robert E. Wall & Stanley Peters. 1981. Introduction to Montague semantics. Dordrecht: Reidel.Google Scholar
Fauconnier, Gilles. 1985. Mental spaces: Aspects of meaning construction in natural language. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.Google Scholar
Frankfurt, Harry G. 2005. On bullshit. Oxford: Princeton University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Frege, Gottlob. [1892]1948. Sense and reference. The Philosophical Review 57 (3). 209–230. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gazdar, Gerald. 1979. Pragmatics: Implicature, presupposition, and logical form. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Green, Mitchell S. & John N. Williams (eds). 2007. Moore’s paradox: New essays on belief, rationality, and the first person. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Grice, H. Paul. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Peter Cole & Jerry L. Morgan (eds.), Syntax and semantics 3: Speech acts, 40–58. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Gygax, Pascal, Sandrine Zufferey & Ute Gabriel. 2021. Le cerveau pense-t-il au masculin? Cerveau, langage et représentations sexistes. Paris: Le Robert.Google Scholar
Karttunen, Lauri & Stanley Peters. 1979. Conventional implicature. In Choon-Kyu Oh & David A. Dinneen (eds.), Syntax and semantics 11: Presupposition, 1–56. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Kecskes, Istvan. Forthcoming. The interplay of linguistic, conceptual and encyclopedic knowledge in meaning construction and comprehension. In Jesus Romero-Trillo (ed.), The handbook of language and context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, fire and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Levinson, Stephen C. 2000. Presumptive meanings: The theory of generalized conversational implicature. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McConnell-Ginet, Sally. 2020. Words matter: Language and power. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McIntyre, Lee. 2018. Post-truth. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mercier, Hugo. 2020. Not born yesterday: The science of who we trust and what we believe. Oxford: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Mercier, Hugo & Dan Sperber. 2017. The enigma of reason: A new theory of human understanding. London: Allen Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Moeschler, Jacques. 2019. Non-lexical pragmatics: Time, causality and logical words. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2021. Why language? What pragmatics tells us about language and communication. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. Forthcoming. The role of context in Gricean and neo-Gricean pragmatics. In Jesus Romero-Trillo (ed.), The Cambridge handbook of language and context. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Moore, George E. 1993. Moore’s paradox. In Thomas Baldwin (ed.), G. E. Moore: Selected writings, 207–212. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Origgi, Gloria. 2015. La réputation: Qui dit quoi à qui. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ortony, Andrew. 1979. Metaphor: A multidimensional problem. In Andrew Ortony (ed.), 1–16. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Pinker, Steven, Martin A. Novak & James L. Lee. 2008. The logic of indirect speech. PNAS 105(3). 833–838. [URL] cgi pnas.0707192105. DOI logo
Reboul, Anne. 1992. Le paradoxe du mensonge dans la théorie des actes de langage. Cahiers de Linguistique Française 131. 125–147.Google Scholar
. 2013. The social evolution of language and the necessity of implicit communication. In Stephen R. Anderson, Jacques Moeschler & Fabienne Reboul (eds.), The language-cognition interface, 253–273. Geneva: Droz.Google Scholar
. 2017. Cognition and communication in the evolution of language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Recanati, François. 2010. Truth-conditional pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Reid, Thomas. [1764]1970. Inquiry into the human mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Roberts, Craige. 2004. Context in dynamic interpretation. In Laurence R. Horn & Gregory Ward (eds.), The handbook of pragmatics, 197–220. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Sadock, Jerrold M. 1978. On testing for conversational implicature. In Peter Cole (ed.), Syntax and semantics 9: Pragmatics, 281–297. New York: Academic Press.Google Scholar
Searle, John R. 1969. Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1979. Expression and meaning: Studies in the theory of speech acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sperber, Dan. 1996. Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Sperber, Dan & Deirdre Wilson. 1995. Relevance: Communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell, 2nd ed.Google Scholar
Sperber, Dan, Fabrice Clément, Christophe Heintz, Olivier Mascaro, Hugo Mercier, Gloria Origgi & Deirdre Wilson. 2010. Epistemic vigilance. Mind & Language 25 (4). 359–393. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Stalnaker, Ronald C. 1977. Pragmatic presuppositions. In Andy Rogers, Bob Wall & John P. Murphy (eds.), Proceedings of the Texas conference on performatives, presuppositions and implicatures, 135–147. Arlington: Center for Applied Linguistics. Reprinted in Stalnaker 1999.Google Scholar
Stanley, Jason. 2018. How fascism works: The politics of us and them. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Wilson, Deirdre. 2017. Irony, hyperbole, jokes and banter. In Joanna Blochowiak, Cristina Grisot, Stephanie Durrleman & Christopher Laenzlinger (eds.), Formal models in the study of language: Applications in interdisciplinary contexts, 201–219. Cham: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Deirdre & Robyn Carston. 2007. A unitary approach to lexical pragmatics: Relevance, inference and ad hoc concepts. In Noel Burton-Roberts (ed.), Pragmatics, 230–259. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wilson, Deirdre & Dan Sperber. 2004. Relevance Theory. In Laurence R. Horn and Gregory Ward (eds.), The handbook of pragmatics, 607–632. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
. 2012. Truthfulness and relevance. In Meaning and relevance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zufferey, Sandrine, Jacques Moeschler & Anne Reboul. 2019. Implicatures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Allan, Keith
2023. Why truth is necessarily pragmatic. Intercultural Pragmatics 20:3 ► pp. 251 ff. DOI logo
Moeschler, Jacques
2023. What makes inferences reliable? The unpredictable relationship between pragmatic inference and truth. Journal of Pragmatics 218 ► pp. 153 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.