Between Minds: representing one’s own and others’ minds (through explicatures).

In this dissertation, I show how promising pragmatic intrusion based on the notion of explicature can be in dealing with various topics belonging to epistemology and knowledge transmission, such as propositional attitude reports, attitudes ‘de se’, Immunity to Error through Misidentification, knowing how, quotation and indirect reports. The dissertation is divided into two parts. In the first part, I discuss theoretical problems pertaining to the notion of explicatures, the most important of which is ‘Are explicatures cancellable?’ . I argue that they are not. I support this position further through considerations on modularity of mind. I also discuss the picture of inferential pragmatics by pointing out connections between Relevance Theory and Default semantics. I apply notions of modularity of mind and non-cancellability of explicatures to definite descriptions. I also address basic problems pertaining to semantic minimalism and I argue that it is compatible with contextualism. In part 2, I deal with attitude reports and explain how to deal with failure of substitutivity of identicals in terms of pragmatic intrusion. I provide further evidence showing that pragmatic intrusion must be postulated in propositional attitude reports. The discussion on pragmatic intrusion continues with attitudes ‘de se’, which are discussed in terms of semantics and philosophy. I explore various cases of inferences in which ‘de se’ attitudes involve an explicature based on an Ego concept. I argue that Immunity to Error through Misidentification largely depends on semantico/pragmatic considerations and, in particular, on pragmatic intrusion. In this thesis I also explore analogies between propositional attitude reports and indirect reports, from the point of view of substitutivity of identicals. In connection with indirect reports, I expatiate on inferential processes that are non-reflective and independent of context and inferential processes which heavily depend on context (thus the connection between indirect reports and language games). Knowing how is discussed in terms of pragmatic intrusion. I show, in fact, that many problems relating to knowing-how cannot be understood without an application of the notion of explicature. Finally, I provide a view of quotation that is essentially pragmatic and radical, on the grounds that it is more parsimonious that a view which starts with semantics.