Attributions of propositional attitude and pragmatic intrusion

pp. 307-319

in: Alessandro Capone, The pragmatics of indirect reports, Berlin, Springer, 2016

Abstract

In this chapter I explore connections between my ideas on the non-cancellability of explicatures (in general) and the explicatures of attributions of propositional attitudes. Since I claim that here opacity is created pragmatically through explicatures, the onus is placed on me to show that such explicatures are non-cancellable. In fact, I show that non-cancellability in several places is the consequence of the fact that the explicature is required to make the proposition conveyed logical. Nevertheless, I consider certain cogent objections and I claim that it is the semantics of the discourse that overrides the application of certain pragmatic principles.