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.