Michael McCourt - Semantics and pragmatics in a modular mind
Michael McCourt - Semantics and pragmatics in a modular mind
Friday September 3 at 10:00, Philosophy student Mike McCourt defends his dissertation, “Semantics and pragmatics in a modular mind,” on the question of how to understand the distinction between semantics and pragmatics in a mentalistic linguistics. The committee is Alexander Williams, Ellen Lau, Georges Rey, Paul Pietroski and Peter Carruthers, with Yi Ting Huang from HESP as the Dean’s representative. The defense will be hybrid in format, physically at the LSC and online at Zoom. It will follow standard University procedures, with public questions preceding nonpublic questions from the committee.
Abstract
A distinction is commonly drawn between semantic and pragmatic aspects of linguistic understanding. How should we understand this distinction in a mentalistic linguistics? Some theorists hypothesize that the distinction is grounded in the modularity of semantic processes (where the notion of modularity, if not the hypothesis, is due to Fodor 1983). Others reject this hypothesis and suggest that, from the perspective of linguistic processing, there is no principled distinction to be drawn between semantics and pragmatics. As I argue, although theorists in the first group have sometimes been overly credulous about the modularity hypothesis for semantics, those in the second group have sometimes been too quick to reject it. I therefore provide an impartial and careful discussion of the relevant evidence and arguments, drawing on philosophy of language, psycholinguistics, and cognitive science more generally.